Shafaq News / The conversational AI bot ChatGPT is having a moment, promising to transform the ways in which we produce written text, search the web, and educate ourselves.

The latest ChatGPT achievement? Almost passing the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE).

We're talking about an exam known for its difficulty here, one that usually requires some 300 to 400 hours of preparation to complete and which covers everything from basic science concepts to bioethics.

The USMLE is actually three exams in one, and the competency with which ChatGPT is able to answer its questions shows that these AI bots could one day be useful for medical training and even for making certain types of diagnoses.

"ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement," write the researchers in their published paper. "Additionally, ChatGPT demonstrated a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations."

ChatGPT is a type of artificial intelligence known as a large language model or LLM. These LLMs are specifically geared towards written responses, and through vast amounts of sample text and some clever algorithms, they're able to make predictions about which words should go together in a sentence, much like the big brother to your phone's predictive text function.

(Times Higher Education)