Taipei, Taiwan – Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has already ushered in a “healthcare revolution” and is poised to revolutionize pharmaceutical research, patient diagnostics, and post-operative care, according to a senior executive at Nvidia.

Kimberly Powell, who is the vice president of healthcare at Nvidia, stated on Wednesday that although the technology is still in its nascent stages, AI will likely have a more significant impact on healthcare than on any other field.

“Healthcare is probably the most impactful utility of generative AI that there will be,” Powell mentioned during Nvidia’s AI Summit, organized alongside the Computex expo in Taipei.

Powell noted that AI is already making strides in the development and testing of new medications, a process that can currently span up to 15 years and cost around $2 billion.

“We care about fast and fast means in this industry, that we’ll be able to do more, and we know that drug discovery is essentially an infinite problem. You’re looking at a chemical space and 10 to the 60th power potential chemical compounds,” Powell explained.

“This is essentially an infinite compute. Probably, the only way to intelligently search that space is through generative data.”

She explained that AI could be employed for modeling to aid researchers in understanding how the body might respond to new chemical entities, potentially lowering the 90 percent failure rate of most drugs in clinical trials.

“With generative AI, we’re going to be able to not only generate more ideas and predict with better accuracy, but we’re also going to be able to model biology in new and exciting ways so that when we put a new chemical entity into the clinic, we have a higher success rate,” she stated.

Nvidia, the world’s third-largest company by market capitalization, has made healthcare a significant focus of its strategy to leverage the future applications of AI.

The company, based in California, has developed a range of platforms, software, and medical devices to assist healthcare professionals in areas like digital imaging, diagnostic scans, and robot-assisted surgery.

This past March, Nvidia entered into deals with Johnson & Johnson and GE Healthcare to integrate AI into surgical procedures and medical imaging, respectively.

Powell remarked that similar technology is already being utilized in autonomous vehicles to convert raw data into actionable insights.

“If you think about an ultrasound, or even robotic surgery and self-driving cars, they’re not that different. There’s lots of sensor data coming in, so there are real-time decisions being made,” she elaborated.

She also indicated that generative AI will play an essential role in postoperative and follow-up care, such as generating post-treatment reports with patient data or evaluating a past surgical procedure to determine its success.

“There’s six to 12 people in that room operating and making decisions in real-time. And then, just like sports – a lot of athletes do this at the end of the game – surgeons also go back and look at the surgery to understand what they could have done better,” Powell described.

“You can imagine how generative AI is going to have really important utility in every stage of surgery.”

Nvidia's GPUs have spurred significant investment in AI, transforming the once relatively obscure startup into a company nearing a $3 trillion valuation in just a few years.

Generative AI gained widespread attention last year with the launch of OpenAI’s revolutionary app ChatGPT, igniting a wave of enthusiasm and concern about the technology’s potential uses.