3 Questions: Leo Anthony Celi on ChatGPT and medicine

Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can not only engage in human-like conversation, but also provide accurate answers to questions in a wide range of knowledge domains. The chatbot, created by the firm OpenAI, is based on a family of "large language models" -- algorithms that can recognize, predict, and generate text based on patterns they identify in datasets containing hundreds of millions of words. In a study appearing in PLOS Digital Health this week, researchers report that ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) -- a comprehensive, three-part exam that doctors must pass before practicing medicine in the United States. In an editorial accompanying the paper, Leo Anthony Celi, a principal research scientist at MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, a practicing physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and his co-authors argue that ChatGPT's success on this exam should be a wake-up call for the medical community. Q: What do you think the success of ChatGPT on the USMLE reveals about the nature of the medical education and evaluation of students?