Have LLMs improved patient outcomes?

Cardiologist/author tends to be more bullish than I am about AI in medicine, but in his latest post he concludes that at least thus far there is “very little evidence for LLMs benefiting patients or doctors for health outcomes” (aside from helping with administrative work and the like). As Topol notes, his review was partly inspired by this recent editorial in Nature Medicine, which points in the same direction: You can read Topol’s detailed review here. All of this fits with my recent Please don’t trust your chatbot for medical advice, which focused more on unsupervised use of LLMs by patients, rather than overall clinical outcomes, but in many ways converges to a similar place. AI will surely someday be a major boon for medicine, but current tools such as domain-general chatbots may not be up to the job.