Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says its AI outperforms doctors on hard cases as he chases ‘medical superintelligence’

Microsoft’s AI diagnostic system correctly diagnosed complex medical cases in a simulation more than twice as often as generalist physicians, according to a study published Thursday in Science. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI’s CEO, called the result a step toward “medical superintelligence.”

The system, dubbed MAI-DxO (DxO for short), coordinates several AI agents that act like a panel of doctors. They question a patient, order tests, and debate a diagnosis.

In a simulation using complex cases from the New England Journal of Medicine, it was correct 83% of the time. Primary care doctors and general internists, working individually with reference materials, were correct 36% of the time. One note: Cases this complex are usually handled by specialists or physician teams, who weren’t part of the comparison.

“As we’ve seen multiple times in the last five or six years, the progress happens very quickly once you have a flywheel,” Suleyman said. “A flywheel means we have a model in production which we are iterating with real-world usage in order to identify gaps in the model and then patch them and improve them. That’s what’s happened in coding. It’s what happened in chat before that. And I think next year it’s going to start to happen for medical records and for clinical decision support.”

“This technology is ready for real-world evaluations, and you can imagine the complexity and diversity of issues that come from a Boston emergency department on a Friday evening,” King said.

Google published a clinical study alongside Beth Israel in The Lancet this month to evaluate Google’s AMIE conversational diagnostic AI in real-world urgent care visits, while human physicians monitored the interactions in real time.

“We have to have the absolute number one state-of-the-art medical clinical decision support products over the next few years,” Suleyman said.

“There is something very substantial and exciting here,” Dominic King, vice president of Health at Microsoft AI, told TechCrunch. “The biggest challenge in healthcare delivery at the moment is the growing mismatch between demand and supply of medical expertise.”

In publishing these results , Microsoft joins Go o gle and OpenAI in claiming that its AI can match or outperform doctors.

The study’s own data suggests that much of the improvement comes from more powerful underlying AI models, with Microsoft’s orchestration system adding gains on top.