Microsoft doubles down on healthcare AI investments

Microsoft is doubling down on its healthcare artificial intelligence investments with two new partnerships.

The first partnership the company inked this year was with AI-powered pathology company Paige. 

Under the partnership, Microsoft will work with Paige’s technology to develop large-scale machine learning models for oncology and pathology research. The company’s aim is to apply artificial intelligence to digital pathology images to develop and deliver new clinical applications and computational biomarkers in order to transform cancer diagnosis and patient care. 

The tech giant also said it would make an investment into the company in order to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence in digital pathology.

But this isn’t the only healthcare AI move the company made this month. 

The second is its “multibillion” dollar investment into OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, ​​an artificial intelligence chatbot that generates humanlike responses, recently passed all three parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam. 

According to findings published Dec. 21, researchers found ChatGPT “performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement.”

Researchers suggested that this language model may have the potential to assist with medical education and, potentially, clinical decision-making. Although Microsoft did not detail its plans for its investment in OpenAI, it did preface that it is working to integrate OpenAI tools across all of its Azure product line.