Curiosity · AI Model
Google Med-PaLM 2
Med-PaLM 2 is Google Research's medical-specialist large language model, a follow-up to Med-PaLM. It was the first LLM to exceed 85% on MedQA (US Medical Licensing Exam-style questions), and it is now offered to selected healthcare customers through Vertex AI's MedLM family as a reference model for clinical-grade domain LLMs.
Model specs
- Vendor
- Family
- MedLM
- Released
- 2023-07
- Context window
- 8,000 tokens
- Modalities
- text
Strengths
- First LLM to exceed 85% on MedQA — a USMLE-style benchmark
- Tuned against clinician-rated safety and helpfulness metrics
- Available to selected healthcare customers on Vertex AI MedLM
- Extensive human-evaluation reported by Google Research
Limitations
- Not approved as a medical device — cannot be used for clinical decision-making
- Restricted access — not generally available
- Knowledge cutoff and 2023-era architecture lag frontier 2025/2026 models
- Requires rigorous clinical oversight in any deployment
Use cases
- Clinical QA and USMLE-style study tools
- Medical summarisation of research articles
- Drafting clinician-facing patient summaries
- Research benchmarks for medical reasoning
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | As of |
|---|---|---|
| MedQA (USMLE-style) | ≈86.5% | 2023 |
| MedMCQA | ≈72% | 2023 |
Frequently asked questions
What is Med-PaLM 2?
Med-PaLM 2 is a medical-specialist large language model from Google Research. It is a follow-up to Med-PaLM and was the first LLM to exceed 85% on the MedQA benchmark, a dataset of USMLE-style multiple-choice questions.
Can I use Med-PaLM 2 today?
Med-PaLM 2 is not generally available. It is offered to selected healthcare customers through Vertex AI's MedLM family under specific terms, and is not approved as a medical device for clinical decision-making.
How does Med-PaLM 2 compare to generalist LLMs?
Frontier generalist models like GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.7 now score very high on MedQA too, but Med-PaLM 2 was evaluated with careful clinician-rated rubrics for helpfulness, bias, and harm — a template many healthcare LLM projects still follow.
Is it safe to use for patient care?
No — Med-PaLM 2 is not regulatorily approved as a medical device. Any clinical use requires rigorous physician oversight, and Google's own product guidance treats it as a research tool or an assistive technology, not an autonomous decision-maker.
Sources
- Google Research — Med-PaLM 2 — accessed 2026-04-20
- Nature paper — Med-PaLM — accessed 2026-04-20