Microsoft has revealed details of an artificial intelligence system that performs better than human doctors at complex health diagnoses, creating a "path to medical superintelligence". The company's AI unit, which is led by the British tech pioneer Mustafa Suleyman, has developed a system that imitates a panel of expert physicians tackling "diagnostically complex and intellectually demanding" cases. Microsoft said that when paired with OpenAI's advanced o3 AI model, its approach "solved" more than eight of 10 case studies specially chosen for the diagnostic challenge. When those case studies were tried on practising physicians – who had no access to colleagues, textbooks or chatbots – the accuracy rate was two out of 10. Microsoft said it was also a cheaper option than using human doctors because it was more efficient at ordering tests.

Microsoft has taken "a genuine step towards medical superintelligence," says Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the company's artificial intelligence arm. The tech giant says its powerful new AI tool can diagnose disease four times more accurately and at significantly less cost than a panel of human physicians. The experiment tested whether the tool could correctly diagnose a patient with an ailment, mimicking work typically done by a human doctor. The Microsoft team used 304 case studies sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine to devise a test called the Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark (SDBench). A language model broke down each case into a step-by-step process that a doctor would perform in order to reach a diagnosis.