SAN FRANCISCO – A viral post by Nikita Bier, X’s product leader, saying that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, suggested an important medical test that a doctor first dismissed has sparked a heated debate on social media about the increasing use of AI in healthcare.
Bier’s post on X talked of a time when he took a friend with a high temperature to the emergency department. “Put their symptoms in Grok. Grok told me to get four tests. The doctor indicated one of them isn’t needed. I made sure we did them all. “The one he didn’t want to do came back positive,” Nikita Bier wrote.
Elon Musk himself got involved, responding to Bier’s tweet with a simple but powerful order: “Always check with @Grok.”
A lot of people have reacted on social media to Musk’s support. Some individuals shared similar stories about times when AI insights helped in medical situations. Someone said, “A few weeks ago, I used Grok to check my niece’s symptoms (her finger was swelling in a strange way), and Grok noticed something strange about her nail that wasn’t very clear.” I went to the hospital, and her nail bed was infected!
But there were also a lot of people who disagreed with the idea of using AI too much for medical diagnostics and warned against it. Critics were doubtful of Bier’s unproven story and warned against the limitations of AI in complicated medical settings.
One person asked about the specifics of Bier’s story, saying, “What were their symptoms, what tests did the doctor order, and what tests did they not order?” This is crucial for your story to be convincing at all, which is presumably why you left it out.
Someone else gave a more detailed warning: “Be careful.” It’s a machine that matches patterns. It doesn’t know why those exams were given or what they meant; it simply knows what was used to teach it and what it can find on the internet. That being said? YES. Why do you believe they call it “practicing” medicine? Another response stressed the importance of human knowledge by saying, “A good doctor with experience would not have needed AI at all.” I hate to break this to all you AI fans.
There are bigger conversations going on about what AI can and can’t do in sensitive areas like healthcare. Experts continue to stress the need for thorough testing, strong safeguards, and human oversight, even though advanced AI models like Grok 4 (the next generation of Grok, set to be released in 2025) are being designed with better reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and even the ability to work in HIPAA-compliant environments. The most important things to worry about are still data privacy, possible biases in training data, and the chance that wrong diagnoses could have significant effects.
Nikita Bier, who is known for building famous apps like Gas and TBH, is now the Head of Product at X. He tweeted on July 30 that he was joining X as Head of Product, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve officially posted my way to the top.” X is the most important social network in the planet. “It’s where the internet culture started and where the most powerful people in the world meet.” His job at X is to use Grok to improve user experiences, for as by making “hyper-relevant timelines.”