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When Bigger Isn’t Smarter: Stress‑Testing LLMs in the ICU

A hospital does not buy “intelligence.” It buys a workflow. That distinction sounds obvious until an AI vendor arrives with a model that has billions of parameters, a clinical pretraining story, and the gentle implication that smaller models are now museum pieces. In the ICU, however, the useful question is not whether the model can talk like a doctor. It is whether it can detect tomorrow’s clinical deterioration from messy notes better than simpler systems that cost less, run faster, and attract fewer infrastructure headaches. ...

December 24, 2025 · 12 min · Zelina