Episode Details

“A.I. is not the problem; it’s the solution.”—Andrew Ng at TED, 17 October 2023

Recorded 21 November 2023

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Eric Topol (00:00):

Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted to have with me Andrew Ng, who is a giant in AI who I've gotten to know over the years and have the highest regard. So Andrew, welcome.

Andrew Ng (00:14):

 Hey, thanks Eric. It's always a pleasure to see you.

Eric Topol (00:16):

Yeah, we've had some intersections in multiple areas of AI. The one I wanted to start with is that you've had some direct healthcare nurturing and we've had the pleasure of working with Woebot Health, particularly with Alison Darcy, where the AI chatbot has been tested in randomized trials to help people with depression and anxiety. And, of course, that was a chatbot in the pre-transformer or pre-LLM era. I wonder if you could just comment about that as well as your outlook for current AI models in healthcare.

Andrew Ng (01:05):

So Alyson Darcy is brilliant. It's been such a privilege to work with her over the years. One of the exciting things about AI is a general purpose technology. It's not useful for one thing. And I think in healthcare and more broadly across the world, we're seeing many creative people use AI for many different applications. So I was in Singapore a couple months ago and I was chatting with some folks, Dean Chang and one of his doctors, Dr. M, about how they're using AI to read EHRs in a hospital in Singapore to try to estimate how long a patient's going to be in the hospital because of pneumonia or something. And it was actually triggering helpful for conversations where a doctor say, oh, I think this patient will be in for three days, but the AI says no, I'm guessing 15 days. And this triggers a conversation where the doctor takes a more careful look. And I thought that was incredible. So all around the world, many innovators everywhere, finding very creative ways to apply AI to lots of different problems. I think that's super exciting.

Eric Topol (02:06):

Oh, it's extraordinary to me. I think Geoff Hinton has thought that the most important application of current AI is in the healthcare/ medical sphere. But I think that the range here is quite extraordinary. And one of the other things that you've been into for all these years with Coursera starting that and all the courses for deep learning.AI —the democratization of knowledge and education in AI. Since this is something like all patients would want to look up on whatever GPT-X about their symptoms different than of course a current Google search. What's your sense about the ability to use generative AI in this way?

Andrew Ng (

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