From GPT-4 to GPT-5: Measuring Progress in Medical Language Understanding [pdf]
41 fertrevino 17 8/21/2025, 10:52:14 PM fertrevino.com ↗
I recently worked on running a thorough healthcare eval on GPT-5. The results show a (slight) regression in GPT-5 performance compared to GPT-4 era models.
I found this to be an interesting finding. Here are the detailed results: https://www.fertrevino.com/docs/gpt5_medhelm.pdf
eg - GPT-5 beats GPT-4 on factual recall + reasoning (HeadQA, Medbullets, MedCalc).
But then slips on structured queries (EHRSQL), fairness (RaceBias), evidence QA (PubMedQA).
Hallucination resistance better but only modestly.
Latency seems uneven (maybe more testing?) faster on long tasks, slower on short ones.
“Did you try running it over and over until you got the results you wanted?”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you’re framing a completely normal proces (try, fail, adjust) as if it’s unreasonable?
In reality, when something doesn’t work, it would seem to me that the obvious next step is to adapt and try again. This does not seem like a radical approach but instead seems to largely be how problem solving sort of works?
For example, when I was a kid trying to push start my motorcycle, it wouldn’t fire no matter what I did. Someone suggested a simple tweak, try a different gear. I did, and instantly the bike roared to life. What I was doing wasn’t wrong, it just needed a slight adjustment to get the result I was after.
One thing it's hard to wrap my head around is that we are giving more and more trust to something we don't understand with the assumption (often unchecked) that it just works. Basically your refrain is used to justify all sorts of odd setup of AIs, agents, etc.
I think pdf.js even defaults to not running scripts in PDFs by default (would need to double check), if you want to view it in the browser's sandbox. Of course there's still always text rendering based security attacks and such but, again, there's nothing unique to that vs a webpage in a browser.