Why Medical AI Needs a Referee | Protege's Engy Ziedan
The a16z Show
Aug 24
Why Medical AI Needs a Referee | Protege's Engy Ziedan
Why Medical AI Needs a Referee | Protege's Engy Ziedan

The a16z Show
Aug 24
Unprocessed episode, you can be the first!
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Shownote
Daisy Wolf and Eva Steinman are joined by Engy Ziedan, co-founder and Chief
Scientific Officer of Protege, to discuss why medical AI has a measurement
problem, and why scoring well on a benchmark doesn't necessarily mean a model is
ready for the hospital.
Engy explains why healthcare AI needs independent evaluations that go beyond
static exams and measure how models actually perform in real-world clinical
workflows. They explore the risks of subtle bias and misalignment, why the same
model can rank differently depending on how it's prompted or tested, and what
happens as AI becomes more personalized and changes faster than traditional
healthcare quality systems can keep up.
The conversation also gets into Protege's role as an independent evaluator, how
contaminated training data can undermine benchmarks, and why the future of
medical AI may require continuous monitoring rather than occasional testing.
Resources:
Read our insights piece:
https://www.a16z.news/p/the-oracle-problem-an-invisible-bottleneck
[https://www.a16z.news/p/the-oracle-problem-an-invisible-bottleneck]
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[https://x.com/evajsteinman]
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