Nvidia announces AI-powered health care 'agents' that outperform nurses — and cost $9 an hour

High-powered chipmaker Nvidia has teamed up with artificial intelligence health care company Hippocratic AI to develop generative AI "agents" that not only outperform human nurses on video calls but cost a lot less per hour.

The two companies on Thursday announced their collaboration to build "empathetic health care agents" powered by Nvidia and trained on Hippocratic's health care-focused large language model (LLM) that are better able to form a human connection with patients through "super-low latency conversational reactions." 

Hippocratic's agents have already been tested by more than 1,000 registered nurses and 100 licensed physicians in the U.S., and dozens of health care providers are trying out the bots internally for non-diagnostic tasks.

The company's data shows its bots outperform not only rivals such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and the LLaMA 2 70B Chat, but beat human nurses in every category tested.

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Hippocratic says its Constellation model outperformed real nurses 79% to 63% in identifying a medication's impact on lab values; 88% to 45% in identifying condition-specific disallowed over-the-counter medications; 96% to 93% in correctly comparing a lab value to a reference range; and 81% to 57% in detecting toxic dosages of over-the-counter drugs.

In a press release, Nvidia and Hippocratic touted the agents as a way to help ease the shortage of health care workers in the U.S.

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Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, said in a statement, "We’re working with NVIDIA to continue refining our technology and amplify the impact of our work of mitigating staffing shortages while enhancing access, equity and patient outcomes."

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"Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in health care, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would," Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, said.

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The generative AI-powered bots also cost a fraction of the hourly rate for nurses. 

Hippocratic's website shows its agents cost $9 an hour to operate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay for nurses was $39.05 as of 2022.