Nvidia wants to replace nurses with AI at $9 an hour

NVIDIA announced Collaboration With Hippocratic AI on Monday, a healthcare company is offering to hire generic AI nurses for just $9 an hour. Hippocratic promotes how it can replace actual human nurses, which can cost as much as $90 an hour, with its cheap AI agents, which provide medical advice to patients via real-time video calls. .

“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI could usher in an era of abundance in health care, but only if the technology responds to patients like a human,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA, said in a press release Monday. ” ,

Nvidia is powering Hippocratic’s real-time responses via video calls. In a demo published by Nvidia, a semi-human-looking AI agent named Rachel verbally instructs a patient to take penicillin. The agent then tells the patient that they will pass all this information on to their actual patient. Human doctor. According to one of Hippocratic’s product pages, Rachel is one of several AI nurses that healthcare providers can choose from. The specialties of AI nurses range from “colonoscopy screening” to “breast cancer care manager,” all at less than minimum wage.

Hippocratic directly promotes how this could lower the living wage for real nurses as a feature, not a bug. A page from the company’s website report comparing it to a human nurse $90/hour salary vs. $9/hour running costs for an AI agent, hippocratic Claims its AI nurses outperform human nurses According to a survey, regarding patient’s lack of treatment, education and satisfaction.

The introduction of AI healthcare agents comes at a tumultuous time for the nursing industry. 32,000 nurses will go on strike across the country in 2023According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that accounts for a quarter of all major strikes in the United States. Nurses are facing a workforce shortage that predates the COVID-19 pandemic, which Hippocratic wants to address.

The Hippocratic Collaboration was one of many announcements from Nvidia’s GTC 2024 conference, but this AI development was perhaps the most dystopian. Hippocratic says their AI nurses were tested by thousands of human nurses and hundreds of human doctors. The company’s technology is being tested by more than 40 healthcare professionals. Suppliers all over the country.

Hippocratic states in its article, “With generative AI, the incremental cost of health care access and intervention drops to zero.” about page, “LLM is the only scalable way to bridge this gap,” he said, referring to the gap in healthcare supply and demand.

The AI ​​company working with Nvidia says its generative AI nurses are not good enough to make diagnoses. AI healthcare agents are trained to involve humans when appropriate. The name Hippocratic is inspired by the Hippocratic Oath, a code of conduct that doctors follow and which means “First, do no harm.”

The Hippocratic collaboration was small compared to many of Nvidia’s other partnerships and announcements on Monday. New AI Chips, Blackwell, This will definitely advance the AI ​​community with the faster training of LLM. Nvidia also expanded its partnerships with several partners, including Google CloudStrengthening its role as an industry leader in AI.