Q&A: Microsoft research head explains how generative AI could help doctors be more human

Generative AI is having a moment. Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoft’s approach to health care and co-authored the 2023 book “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond,” calls it “the most transformative tool ever developed in all aspects of health care and medicine.”

Microsoft has been collaborating with the organization OpenAI for several years, so when OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, Lee quickly realized there was a need to educate the medical world on the technology.

“I started to get emails from doctor friends of mine around the world, more or less all saying the same thing: ‘Wow, Peter, this is amazing stuff and I’m using it in my clinic for this purpose,’” Lee told STAT. “That was frightening. … That started us down the long road of deeply investigating the benefits, as well as the limitations, of these models in the medical domain, as well as writing educational material, including a whole book written explicitly for doctors and nurses.”

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