Paul Taylor is professor of health informatics at UCL.
In October last year 2.17 million people, 507,000 of them children, were in contact with mental health services in England. In 2023-24, 958,000 children, 8 per cent of the twelve million children in England, had an active referral to the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services. In 2013-14 this figure was 157,000. Some see in this huge increase evidence of welcome attention...
When DeepSeek announced the release of its chatbot in January, there was widespread bewilderment. How had a Chinese company been able to develop something that could compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini despite a US export ban on the latest Nvidia chips that almost all large language models rely on? DeepSeek said it had built its model at a cost of only $5.5 million,...
Qilin and Synnovis, the two entities involved in the recent ransomware attack that has disabled laboratory services at London hospitals, are very different in many ways but nevertheless have a common purpose: using tech to extract money from healthcare organisations.
Altmetric is a website that tracks mentions of academic research on social media. Last week, a paper published in Radiology Case Reports leaped to near the top of the charts. The explosion of interest in ‘Successful management of an iatrogenic portal vein and hepatic artery injury in a four-month-old female patient’ was due not to admiration but schadenfreude, as people shared their astonishment that the authors had managed to commit the following paragraph to print:
In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.
Late last year, Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk in front of an invited audience after the Bletchley Park summit on AI safety. He asked Musk what impact AI would have on the labour market, and tried to steer him towards a reassuring answer: AI wouldn’t take away people’s jobs but would create new ones – and politicians like Sunak could help by creating an incredible...
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