Peter Lee is the primary force behind Microsoft’s ongoing experiments in the clinical use of AI, including its partnership with electronic health records software maker Epic to use AI to automatically draft clinicians’ notes. He’s confident that generative AI is the most transformative tool ever developed in all aspects of health care and medicine, including health care delivery, helping patients navigate the complex health care system, and advancing medical research. But he’s open-minded about exactly what form these innovations will take. “We know with this new (AI) technology … that life is going to be transformed for the better,” Lee said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this January. “But we don’t know why yet, because [it’s like we’ve just invented copper wire but] we haven’t yet invented the lightbulb, or the toaster, or the radio.”
STAT’s Nicholas St. Fleur spoke with Lee about the arc of his career and the future of generative AI:
What are your big concerns with generative AI being used in the medical field?
The main thing I’ve been trying to teach doctors and nurses is that if your mental model of a computer is that it’s a machine that does perfect memory recall and perfect calculation — then the most important thing to understand about generative AI is that it’s not a computer. It’s a reasoning engine or a thinking machine, but it also has some of the same limitations as a human brain.
Can generative AI help human doctors be more human?
It’s such a good question. We talk about humans prompting the AI, but there are times when the AI can prompt the human to just take a step back and reflect, just for a moment longer, about a potentially difficult situation. Put yourself in the shoes of the doctor. [Epic using GPT-4] proposes a note that puts at the end, “Congratulations on your son’s high school basketball team winning the championship!” It actually causes the doctor reading that draft, maybe for just three seconds longer, to reflect on the life of that patient. It sounds beautiful and creepy and wonderful and disturbing all at the same time.
Read the full conversation.
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