How to Do It is Slate's sex advice column. Send it to Jessica and Rich here. I recently started casually online dating after leaving an abusive marriage, and it's been going great! There have been lots of nice guys, and we have had some sexy fun. That said, I've run into a weird situation that I'm almost certainly overthinking but am baffled by.

While recent advancements in commercial large language models (LM) have shown promising results in medical tasks, their closed-source nature poses significant privacy and security concerns, hindering their widespread use in the medical field. Despite efforts to create open-source models, their limited parameters often result in insufficient multi-step reasoning capabilities required for solving complex medical problems. To address this, we introduce Meerkat, a new family of medical AI systems ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. The models were trained using our new synthetic dataset consisting of high-quality chain-of-thought reasoning paths sourced from 18 medical textbooks, along with diverse instruction-following datasets. Our systems achieved remarkable accuracy across six medical benchmarks, surpassing the previous best models such as MediTron and BioMistral, and GPT-3.5 by a large margin. Notably, Meerkat-7B surpassed the passing threshold of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) for the first time for a 7B-parameter model, while Meerkat-70B outperformed GPT-4 by an average of 1.3%. Additionally, Meerkat-70B correctly diagnosed 21 out of 38 complex clinical cases, outperforming humans' 13.8 and closely matching GPT-4's 21.8. Our systems offered more detailed free-form responses to clinical queries compared to existing small models, approaching the performance level of large commercial models. This significantly narrows the performance gap with large LMs, showcasing its effectiveness in addressing complex medical challenges.

It's the thing no one wants to talk about but everyone is Googling. No, really: "Vaginal discharge" is searched more than 50,000 times per month worldwide according to Buzz Sumo, a keyword search engine. Everyone is wondering about this, so don't worry. I had a friend just the other day ask me if having regular discharge was normal. "I actually just cannot stay dry," she informed me.