Comparison of the Performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 With That of Medical Students on the Written German Medical Licensing Examination: Observational Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The potential of artificial intelligence (AI)-based large language models, such as ChatGPT, has gained significant attention in the medical field. This enthusiasm is driven not only by recent breakthroughs and improved accessibility, but also by the prospect of democratizing medical knowledge and promoting equitable health care. However, the performance of ChatGPT is substantially influenced by the input language, and given the growing public trust in this AI tool compared to that in traditional sources of information, investigating its medical accuracy across different languages is of particular importance. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to compare the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with that of medical students on the written German medical licensing examination. METHODS: To assess GPT-3.5's and GPT-4's medical proficiency, we used 937 original multiple-choice questions from 3 written German medical licensing examinations in October 2021, April 2022, and October 2022. RESULTS: GPT-4 achieved an average score of 85% and ranked in the 92.8th, 99.5th, and 92.6th percentiles among medical students who took the same examinations in October 2021, April 2022, and October 2022, respectively. This represents a substantial improvement of 27% compared to GPT-3.5, which only passed 1 out of the 3 examinations. While GPT-3.5 performed well in psychiatry questions, GPT-4 exhibited strengths in internal medicine and surgery but showed weakness in academic research. CONCLUSIONS: The study results highlight ChatGPT's remarkable improvement from moderate (GPT-3.5) to high competency (GPT-4) in answering medical licensing examination questions in German. While GPT-4's predecessor (GPT-3.5) was imprecise and inconsistent, it demonstrates considerable potential to improve medical education and patient care, provided that medically trained users critically evaluate its results. As the replacement of search engines by AI tools seems possible in the future, further studies with nonprofessional questions are needed to assess the safety and accuracy of ChatGPT for the general population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".