Google buried the idea of omnipotent AI doctor

Google company released a report on Health AI Agents of 150 pages. That’s 7,000 annotations, over 1,100 hours of expert work. Link in description. Numbers impressive, yes. But the point isn’t in metrics. The point is they buried the very idea of an omnipotent AI doctor. And this is perhaps the most honest thing that happened in this industry recently.

Instead of another inflated Doctor-GPT that supposedly knows everything and can do everything, Google created Personal Health Agent. This is a system of 3 specialized agents. First digs through data from your wearable devices and lab analyses. Second checks medical facts to not spout obvious nonsense. Third conducts dialogue, sets goals and pretends to be empathetic. All this connects an orchestrator with memory that remembers your goals, barriers and insights.

And here it gets interesting. Results show this mixed bag surpassed regular models on 10 benchmarks. 20 participants in study with 50 personas preferred this system to regular language models. And experts rated answers to complex medical queries 6-39% better. Sounds not bad, right?

But these are still flowers. Report authors laid into design principles that sound like mockery of the whole industry. Consider user’s real needs, don’t ask what can be derived independently, minimize latency. Wow, what a revelation! Turns out you can think about people, not just hype.

System tested on various scenarios. General health questions, interpretation of wearable device data and biomarkers, advice on sleep, nutrition, activity, symptom assessment without diagnosis. Everything looks reasonable and careful.

And now about limitations. This smart construction works 7 times slower than single agents: 244 seconds versus 36. Plus authors honestly admit bias audit, data protection and regulatory compliance are needed. Next step – adaptive communication style between empathy and responsibility.

There’s your conclusion. Google shows way forward not through super-doctor bot, but through modular specialized agent teams. Medicine – just first test. In authors’ opinion, next come finance, law, education, science. Maybe finally the industry will understand that honesty and specialization are better than inflated promises of omnipotence?