The Download: the LLM will see you now, and a new fusion power deal

Patients at a small number of clinics in Southern California run by the medical startup Akido Labs are spending relatively little time, or even no time at all, with their doctors. Instead, they see a medical assistant, who can lend a sympathetic ear but has limited clinical training. The job of formulating diagnoses and concocting a treatment plan is done by an LLM-based system called ScopeAI that transcribes and analyzes the dialogue between patient and assistant. A doctor then approves, or corrects, the AI system's recommendations. According to Akido's CEO, this approach allows doctors to see four to five times as many patients as they could previously. But experts aren't convinced that displacing so much of the cognitive work of medicine onto AI is the right way to remedy the doctor shortage.