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So this is a fascinating article about how a family used ChatGPT to help (emphasis on *help*, not on doing everything) diagnose the rare genetic disorder their kid had. While I know it will make some people angry, I think there are a few good lessons in here: www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/12/m...

bostonglobe.comThese parents didn’t know why their daughter was sick. They turned to AI to help solve the mystery. - The Boston GlobeFirst they sequenced the entire genomes of all four members of their family. Then they got down to work.

Both the parents had some level of expertise in both AI and medical science. They focused on primary data and primary sources (and made it quite clear to the tools that they wanted clear links to sources for them to check themselves). Importantly, they worked WITH medical professionals...

... to help interpret the results, rather than assuming that the tool replaced the professionals. They still had to deal with some false alarms (though in this case it was because of bad input data, not AI hallucinations), which is why it was useful that the parents were careful.

I think stories like this are helpful in (again) highlighting how the best use of these tools is very much when they're seen as eager research interns. They can gather lots more data and present potentially useful research avenues, but it's up to the humans & experts to then do the real exploration.

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The problem is the public can't handle facts like vaccines. I did my own research is not viable for most of the public. Perhaps a new occupation of AI research assistant should be created to do this on behalf of the general public?

Yeah this is not a story of “AI” this is a story of a higher search tool They didn’t use the machine to diagnose or tell them what was wrong they used it to find main sources that they themselves read and interpreted

And it still seems to me that if we were paying the actual cost to operate one of these LLMs, enough for it to be profitable, it would be cheaper to hire a live assistant. $1 trillion pays for a lot of research. 

Sure, and that’s the AI companies’ dilemma to solve. Will people/companies pay to use these models once the VC money runs out? My guess is that, at best, it’s a low-margin business, so the jury is out.