Why Andrew Ng bet on this Indian AI healthcare startup

One AI company has topped Hugging Face’s Open Medical-LLM Leaderboard – and it’s neither Google nor OpenAI.

Founded in December 2023, India-based Jivi AI, which is building AI-powered co-pilots for doctors and consumers, scored a 91.65 average in the leaderboard for its latest model. In comparison, both OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Med-PaLM 2 – the latter a specifically medical LLM – scored in the low 80s.

This indicates that Jivi’s model is most reliable in tasks such as understanding and generating clinically accurate information, responding to patient queries, and interpreting medical terms.

Jivi AI co-founder Ankur Jain / Photo credit: Jivi AI

AI Fund, the venture studio of Google Brain and Coursera founder Andrew Ng, poured an undisclosed amount of funding into Jivi just last month – the fund’s first Indian investment.

The appeal is clear. An AI Fund spokesperson notes the “tremendous opportunity” in “providing world-class medical guidance to patients with low access, or a lower ability to pay.”

With the country grappling with an undersupply of doctors relative to population size, India presents an ideal training ground for medical-focused AI models. But for Jivi, India is just the beginning, as healthcare is a global issue, co-founder and CEO Ankur Jain tells Tech in Asia.

The question is, will the AI giants catch up to Jivi’s performance eventually?

Two problems, one solution

On average, India has one doctor for nearly 1,500 individuals – fewer than the 1:1,000 ratio recommended by the World Health Organization. The numbers are even more alarming in rural India, with a 70% shortage of specialist doctors – such as surgeons or pediatricians – according to the country’s health ministry.

There are multiple reasons behind the dearth, whether it’s limited number of seats in government colleges, expensive private courses, and qualified doctors leaving the country for greener pastures in the US and Europe.

Jivi’s AI-powered solution – called Dr. Jivi – aims to solve both the problems of shortage and overburdening via its B2C and B2B offerings.

On the B2C side, users can share their symptoms with Dr. Jivi and receive personalized health observations through the Jivi app. Dr. Jivi can also perform tasks such as analyzing blood reports, answering health-related queries, and giving second opinions.

Meanwhile, Jivi’s B2B offering functions as a co-pilot for doctors, akin to a junior doctor assisting in real time during patient consultations. The solution takes notes, suggests follow-up questions, and even provides potential diagnoses based on symptoms.

Additionally, doctors can generate prescriptions on the app with a single click.

Big expectations