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(Bloomberg) -- Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst are co-leading a $50 million investment in Hippocratic AI, a startup with a generative artificial intelligence tool that it hopes will lower medical costs and make health care more accessible.
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Hippocratic’s valuation wasn’t disclosed in the seed-stage investment Tuesday, but the startup revealed early details of its technology, which provides patients with non-diagnostic information like pre-operation instructions and can explain medical bills or insurance procedures. The system relies on an LLM, or large language model, the approach used by chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The Palo Alto, California based-startup said its AI has passed more than 100 health-care certifications and also outperformed OpenAI’s most powerful model, GPT-4, on the same tests. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hippocratic is part of a boom in new AI technology companies, aiming to capitalize on the viral popularity of ChatGPT. Hippocratic’s system, like many others, is a neural network trained on massive volumes of data, often from across the internet. That information feeds into its natural language processing, which can recognize, summarize, translate, predict and generate text.
The startup is also training its technology to reflect the “bedside manner” that a patient might expect from a physician or nurse. But Hippocratic’s AI isn’t meant to replace a physician, Chief Executive Officer Munjal Shah said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
“We actually don’t think that generative AI is ready to do diagnoses — we think diagnoses need to come much later, when these models are safe,” he said. “You have many other roles that are supporting roles and supporting actors in the health-care system that really could benefit from generative AI.”
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The LLM is able to generate responses that can assist with billing and explanation of health-care benefits, acting as a registered dietitian or responding as a hospital’s compliance officer.
To develop its technology, Hippocratic brought in heath-care professionals like pediatric nurses and dietitians to give feedback on the accuracy of the answers, Shah said.
Hippocratic didn’t disclose when its technology will be made available to the public. Instead, Shah outlined a “threshold-based” strategy for the rollout, where Hippocratic will make the LLM available based on feedback from the health-care professionals it has recruited. The startup hasn’t made a plan yet for how to make money from the LLM.
Hippocratic was founded by a group of physicians, health-care professionals and AI researchers from universities like Stanford and Johns Hopkins and tech companies Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Nvidia Corp.
--With assistance from Caroline Hyde.
(Updates with details from a Bloomberg Television interview starting in fifth paragraph.)
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