The a16z Show
Why Medical AI Needs a Referee | Protege's Engy Ziedan
The a16z Show discusses tech and culture trends, news, and the future – especially as ‘software eats the world’. It features industry experts, business leaders, and other interesting thinkers and voices from around the world. This show is produced by Andreessen Horowitz (aka “a16z”), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Multiple episodes are released every week; visit a16z.com for more details and to sign up for our newsletters and other content as well!
Show Notes
Daisy Wolf and Eva Steinman are joined by Engy Ziedan, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Protege, to discuss why medical AI has a measurement problem, and why scoring well on a benchmark doesn't necessarily mean a model is ready for the hospital.
Engy explains why healthcare AI needs independent evaluations that go beyond static exams and measure how models actually perform in real-world clinical workflows. They explore the risks of subtle bias and misalignment, why the same model can rank differently depending on how it's prompted or tested, and what happens as AI becomes more personalized and changes faster than traditional healthcare quality systems can keep up.
The conversation also gets into Protege's role as an independent evaluator, how contaminated training data can undermine benchmarks, and why the future of medical AI may require continuous monitoring rather than occasional testing.
Resources:
Read our insights piece: https://www.a16z.news/p/the-oracle-problem-an-invisible-bottleneck
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