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Munjal Shah

Co-founder and CEO, Hippocratic AI · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@munjalshah ↗LinkedIn ↗munjalshah.com ↗

Before Hippocratic AI, Shah co-founded and led Andale, Like.com, and digital health company Health IQ. At Hippocratic AI, he leads the development of safety-first large language models and conversational AI agents aimed at mitigating healthcare staffing shortages.

19statements → 11claims → 6claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 4.21/5average certainty → 2.16/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

4 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 9 assertions · 4 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Munjal argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Shah: Operating a voice LLM costs roughly 18 cents per hour
“A large language model speaking at a hundred words per minute will cost somewhere around 18 cents an hour. Okay. So the LLM plus what's the ASR cost, the automatic speech recognition cost, the text-to-speech cost, the TTS cost. We kind of put it all in there. …”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 10:49 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Shah: Not interrupting patients is the primary driver of perceived doctor empathy
“The number one driver of whether you thought you had an empathetic doctor was did they not cut you off when you started telling your story?”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 16:18 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
70% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

269 words/min while actually speaking · 17.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Munjal Shah: only 4 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 4 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 7,241 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Munjal Shah said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shah: AI models attempting medical diagnoses will kill patients
“I mean, they just keep going there. I'm going to do diagnoses because it's grand or it's challenging, but I mean, they're going to kill somebody.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 4:53 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shah: Patient non-adherence is healthcare's biggest problem, not diagnosis
“Our biggest issue in the U.S. And most of the developed world is the people don't follow the directions after they're diagnosed. Like, it's not an issue of diagnoses. It's an issue of adherence.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 5:59 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shah: Foundational LLMs are instruction-tuned for queries, not multi-turn conversations
“They've all instruction tuned for what I call a query, not a conversation.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 18:52 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Supported
Shah: Operating a voice LLM costs roughly 18 cents per hour
“A large language model speaking at a hundred words per minute will cost somewhere around 18 cents an hour. Okay. So the LLM plus what's the ASR cost, the automatic speech recognition cost, the text-to-speech cost, the TTS cost. We kind of put it all in there. …”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 10:49 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Disclosure
Shah: Hippocratic AI is building its healthcare LLM from scratch
“That's why we're building our own model and we're building it from scratch.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 19:59 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Supported
Shah: Hippocratic AI outperformed GPT-4 on 105 of 114 healthcare exams
“And then we took it, and then we had GPT-IV take it, and we had all the other language models take it, and we beat them all. And we beat them on a 105 of a 114 for GPT-IV, for example.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 21:10 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Insight
Shah: Healthcare LLMs require tone classification to detect pain and anger
“You wouldn't need an, a tone classifier for most interactions with an LLM, but you do in healthcare. Because a lot of the information is in the anger, the pain, the frustration.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 30:47 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Disclosure
Shah: Hippocratic AI operates fully in person five days a week
“We're a hundred percent in person. Our company is literally five days a week”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 44:42 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Insight
Shah: Pre-generative AI functioned as an idiot savant in narrow tasks
“It's been a bit of what I call an idiot savant till now. It could do one narrow thing well, but if you took it anything outside of that, it just like didn't work. You know, at least traditional classifier AI.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 3:38 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Partly supported
Shah: The US healthcare system is 20% to 30% understaffed in nursing
“And so in the country today, we're 20%, 30% understaffed and like nurses alone. This isn't just true in the US. This is true in every single country out there.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 9:27 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Insight
Shah: US health plans avoid prevention because Americans change jobs triennially
“It turns out the average person in the US changes healthcare plans every three years because they change jobs every three years. And so the healthcare plan will bear the cost to do the prevention, but won't basically the benefit because actually most of the be…”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 13:16 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Contradicted
Shah: Not interrupting patients is the primary driver of perceived doctor empathy
“The number one driver of whether you thought you had an empathetic doctor was did they not cut you off when you started telling your story?”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 16:18 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Supported
Shah: Llama 2 instruction tuning datasets averaged one instruction per sample
“The average number of instructions on, there's, they have like seven data sets they showed for their instruction tuning. The average number of instructions? One.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 18:26 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Disclosure
Shah: Hippocratic AI acquired 1.5 trillion healthcare tokens for training
“We've actually gone in and acquired 1.5 trillion healthcare tokens.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 22:44 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shah: US health systems will buy finished AI applications, not APIs
“Most of the health systems in the US are going to need a ready finished product slash application, not just have a an API.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 25:40 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Insight
Shah: Deploying in low-risk applications is the best hallucination mitigation
“The number one way to deal with hallucinations is pick the right applications.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 31:35 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shah: Roughly 6,900 of 7,000 US hospitals use standardized medical protocols
“If you look at the 7000 hospitals in the country, like, you know, 6900 will probably use the same protocol.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 34:23 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Assertion Supported
Shah: Almost all FDA AI regulation to date targets diagnostic products
“Almost all your AI regulation to date from the FDA has been on diagnostic products.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 40:47 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare
Disclosure
Shah: Hippocratic AI scraped PDFs for every US healthcare plan
“We've actually taken the time to go and get every single, 200 page PDF of every health care plan in the country.”
Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023 ▶ 28:13 Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Hippocratic AI’s Munjal Shah: Building the First Safety-First LLM for Healthcare Aug 23, 2023 33m
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