China's AI hospitals will transform medicine across the world. But not in the United States.

China has invested heavily in AI across medical applications. Population-scale testing is now underway at Beijing's Tsinghua University, and in Shanghai at Tongji University.

Dramatic improvements are already evident in the observed error rates in diagnosis and treatment recommendations. In the US, diagnostic errors across all disease is over 11%, with high percentages of Americans reporting significant diagnostic errors in their own patient histories. At Tsinghua's AI hospital, errors in diagnosis are under 5%.

As Large Language Models improve and are employed in ever-larger populations of real patients, China's AI in medicine will be rolled out across China, and to dozens of other countries and in areas with limited access to top-quality medical care.

The medical care industry in the United States, however, will almost certainly stand in strong opposition to any tech advances which would reduce the compensation of doctors there. The American Medical Association, along with licensing boards and medical schools, act in concert to strictly ration medical care, and prices and doctor pay as high as possible.

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Will the $1 trillion of generative AI investment pay off?

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Thumbnail image, Medical Error Statistics
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Closing scene, Yuyao, Zhejiang