Microsoft’s growing AI health ambitions

AI-fueled health care advancements are likely to be a major driver of profits as consumers increasingly turn to generative AI for health-related queries, the Financial Times noted. “The potential of GenAI in revolutionizing healthcare is limitless,” from clinical workflows to drug development, but concerns remain, The Lancet argued in an editorial: AI is trained on heavily biased datasets, so risks exacerbating health inequities and producing inaccuracies that could be “detrimental” for patients. GenAI excels at high-repetition, low-risk tasks, so shouldn’t yet be integrated into the medical treatment process, the nuances of which are best left to physicians, a technology expert wrote for the Brookings Institution.

The Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Suleyman are family friends who became rivals when Microsoft opened a new office in London to compete for the same tech talent, The New York Times reported in April. OpenAI — which enjoys a close partnership with Microsoft — held as one of its founding principles the need for genuinely “open source” software that benefits humanity, but has become more commercially minded in recent years, bringing it into even more direct competition with Google, an AI expert argued in The Conversation. That’s mostly a good thing, she added, forcing both companies to “push the boundaries” of the technology.