Nvidia announced A cooperation on Monday with Hippocratic AI, a healthcare company offering generative AI nurses who work for as little as $9 an hour. Hippocrates promotes how it can undercut the work of real nurses, who can cost $90 an hour, by using low-cost AI agents who offer medical advice to patients via real-time video calls.
“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an era of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patient needs as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA in a press release on Monday.
Always-available healthcare agents powered by real-time AI
Nvidia delivers real-time Hippocratic answers via video calls. In the demo released by Nvidia, a half-human artificial intelligence agent named Rachel verbally instructs a patient on how to take penicillin. The agent then tells the patient that she will pass on all this information to her real doctor. According to one of Hippocrates’ product pages, Rachel is one of many AI nurses that healthcare providers can choose from. AI nurses have specialties ranging from “colonoscopy screening” to “breast cancer care manager,” all for less than minimum wage.
Hippocrates directly promotes the way it can undercut real nurses’ wages as a feature, not a bug. One page of the company’s website compares a human nurse Salary of $90 per hour with AI agent running costs of $9 per hour. Hippocrates claims that AI nurses are better than human nurses in terms of bedside care, education and – according to the survey – slightly lacking in satisfaction.
The introduction of AI healthcare agents comes at a tumultuous time for the nursing industry. Above In 2023, 32,000 nurses went on strike across the countryAccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that accounts for one-quarter of all major strikes in the United States. Nurses are struggling with staff shortages that predated the Covid-19 pandemic, which Hippocrates is working to address.
The Hippocrates collaboration was one of many announcements at the Nvidia GTC 2024 conference, but the development of artificial intelligence was perhaps the most dystopian. Hippocrates says AI nurses have been tested by thousands of nurses and hundreds of doctors. The company’s technology is being tested by over 40 healthcare facilities across the country.
“With generative AI, the incremental cost of access to health care and interventions is heading towards zero,” says Hippocrates on his About the website. “LLM is the only scalable way to fill this gap,” referring to the difference in supply and demand for healthcare.
An artificial intelligence company working with Nvidia says its artificial intelligence nurses are not sufficient to make diagnoses. The AI medical agent is trained to engage a human when appropriate. Hippocrates’ name is inspired by the Hippocratic Oath, a code of ethics followed by doctors that means “first, do no harm.”
The Hippocrates collaboration was diminutive compared to many of Nvidia’s other partnerships and announcements on Monday. The company released novel AI chips, Blackwell, which will undoubtedly push the AI community forward with faster LLM training. Nvidia has also expanded cooperation with several partners, including Google Cloudstrengthening its role as an industry leader in artificial intelligence.
