The British Medical Journal reports:

Almost all leading large language models or “chatbots” show signs of mild cognitive impairment in tests widely used to spot early signs of dementia, finds a study in the Christmas issue of the BMJ.

The results also show that “older” versions of chatbots, like older patients, tend to perform worse on the tests. The authors say these findings “challenge the assumption that artificial intelligence will soon replace human doctors.”

Huge advances in the field of artificial intelligence have led to a flurry of excited and fearful speculation as to whether chatbots can surpass human physicians.

Several studies have shown large language models (LLMs) to be remarkably adept at a range of medical diagnostic tasks, but their susceptibility to human impairments such as cognitive decline have not yet been examined.

To fill this knowledge gap, researchers assessed the cognitive abilities of the leading, publicly available LLMs—ChatGPT versions 4 and 4o (developed by OpenAI), Claude 3.5 “Sonnet” (developed by Anthropic), and Gemini versions 1 and 1.5 (developed by Alphabet)—using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test. [Continue reading…]