It was early 2023, and I was sitting in a local restaurant at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, catching up with my friend and colleague Justin Norden. ChatGPT 3.5 had been released a few months prior, and new developments in artificial intelligence were being announced every day, if not every hour.
Justin and I are both faculty members at Stanford’s School of Medicine, and we were meeting up to prepare for the course we were teaching the next quarter, on the digital future of healthcare. But during that conversation, we decided to do something else: start a class on generative AI and medicine—the first ever, as far as we could tell. I’d developed a habit of starting new classes more to learn than to teach, and this was the richest area of learning I could imagine.
Little did I know that this learning process would soon become very personally urgent. Just over a year after that conversation at the Stanford mall, at the age of 49, I was diagnosed with terminal stage 4 lung cancer. And in the years since, I’ve been studying how to use AI to treat, if not cure, my own disease.
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