In Harvard study, AI offered more accurate emergency room diagnoses than two human doctors
The story
A new study examines how large language models perform in a variety of medical contexts, including real emergency room cases — where at least one model seemed to be more accurate than human doctors.
From the source
In Harvard study, AI offered more accurate emergency room diagnoses than two human doctors Anthony Ha 11:00 AM PDT · May 3, 2026 A new study examines how large language models perform in a variety of medical contexts, including real emergency room cases — where at least one model seemed to be more accurate than human doctors.
The study was published this week in Science and comes from a research team led by physicians and computer scientists at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The researchers said they conducted a variety of experiments to measure how OpenAI’s models compared to human physicians.
In one experiment, researchers focused on 76 patients who came into the Beth Israel emergency room, comparing the diagnoses offered by two internal medicine attending physicians to those generated by OpenAI’s o1 and 4o models. These diagnoses were assessed by two other attending physicians, who did not know which ones came from humans and which came from AI.
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Key names and topics in this story: Harvard.
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