ChatGPT passes US Medical Licensing Exam

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that responds to user questions and prompts in a conversational manner and with comprehensive data, recently passed the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), the standard test qualifying someone to practice medicine.

The Daily Mail reports that the tech company AnsibleHealth conducted the study and their researchers said, "Reaching the passing score for this notoriously difficult expert exam, and doing so without any human reinforcement, marks a notable milestone in clinical AI maturation."

The researchers wrote that ChatGPT "possesses the partial ability to teach medicine by surfacing novel and nonobvious concepts that may not be in the learners' sphere of awareness" and "AIs are now positioned to soon become ubiquitous in clinical practice, with diverse applications across all healthcare sectors."

AnsibleHealth also had the service write up their report. ChatGPT has been banned by NYU and other schools in an effort to minimize students using the chatbot for plagiarism as it is so capable of writing comprehensive reports.

Spanning the three-part exam, ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, scored between 52.4 and 75 percent, passing the 60 percent threshold. According to the Daily Mail, "USMLE Step 1 is usually taken at the end of the second year of medical school, Step 2 is taken in the fourth year, and Step 3 is taken after completing med school and the first year of residency."

The study findings were published in the PLOS Digital Health journal after being peer-reviewed. The USMLE has been used since 1992 and over 100,000 med students take the exam.

ChatGPT's test results were compared to those from PubMedGPT, "a counterpart model trained exclusively on biomedical domain literature." PubMedGPT scored 50.8 percent although the questions provided were from an older USMLE dataset.

Chat GPT has also passed an exam at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

On February 1, the makers of ChatGPT, San Francisco-based company OpenAI, announced a subscription-based premium version of the service with new features, a faster response time, and access to subscribers at peak hours.

According to OpenAI's website, "The new subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, will be available for $20/month, and subscribers will receive a number of benefits: General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times, Faster response times, Priority access to new features and improvements"