By Davey Alba | Bloomberg
Alphabet Inc.’s Google said it will expand its health-related artificial intelligence summaries in search, part of an effort to improve its influence in the health sector.
The company also said Tuesday that it has been updating a new AI system to help researchers speed their scientific and biomedical discoveries. “These updates show the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe,” Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, wrote in a blog post timed to a company event in New York.
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The company said that it was rolling out improvements in health-related answers in AI Overviews, a feature in Google searches that puts an AI-generated response at the top of results. Powered by recent advancements on Google’s flagship model, Gemini, AI Overviews will now cover “thousands more” health topics and expand to more countries and languages, including Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, Google said. The company is also adding a separate feature in search called “What People Suggest,” which it said aims to provide users with information from people with similar lived medical experiences.
Last month, the company debuted what it calls AI co-scientist, a system that aims to act as a “virtual scientific collaborator” to researchers and scientists, underpinned by Gemini 2.0. Google said co-scientist can help researchers sift through large amounts of literature to suggest new hypotheses. The co-scientist may generate possible experimental approaches when given a specific research goal or summarize relevant published studies that already exist on the topic.
The company also said it would release TxGemma, an open AI model that it says can help researchers make predictions in the drug development process.
The company has tried for years to transform health care, with its most recent efforts centering around using generative AI. But there are still questions about whether Google’s AI can consistently deliver high-quality health information in real-world health care settings. So far, Alphabet’s tools have been focused mostly on reducing inefficiencies.
The latest announcements also come as Google has over the past several years appeared to struggle to streamline its efforts around health and present a clear vision for what it hopes to accomplish in the sector. In the late 2010s, Alphabet had hundreds of employees dedicated to health. But by 2021, the company disbanded its Google Health unit and redistributed employees working on health products to other divisions at the company. Over the years, it has started and shuttered multiple health projects.
At Tuesday’s event, Google also discussed several health-related updates in its devices division. Last year, the company announced a feature that it said could detect the loss of a pulse from a Google Pixel Watch 3 wearer. This year, the company said it had gotten clearance from the Food and Drug Administration and would start rolling out the feature to US users by the end of the month. It also said that it would launch a new feature for Android phone users to consolidate records from medical providers with health data on the users’ smartphones.
Some of Google’s most meaningful work in the medical world has been in health screenings for populations around the world, including its efforts to screen more than 500,000 individuals for diabetic retinopathy globally as of 2023. At its event, the company also detailed its work developing an AI tool called Capricorn with the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands. The tool, Google said, can generate summaries of treatment options for pediatric cancer patients, drawing both from troves of public medical data as well as de-identified patient data.
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