Google's artificial intelligence-powered medical chatbot has achieved a passing grade on a tough US medical licensing exam, but its answers still fall short of those from human doctors, according to reports.

Last year the release of ChatGPT whose developer OpenAI is backed by Google's rival Microsoft kicked off a race between tech giants in the burgeoning field of AI.

While much has been made about the future possibilities and dangers of AI, health is one area where the technology had already shown tangible progress, with algorithms able to read certain medical scans as well as humans.

Google first unveiled its AI tool for answering medical questions, called Med-PaLM, in a preprint study in December. Unlike ChatGPT, it has not been released to the public.

The US tech giant says Med-PaLM is the first large language model, an AI technique trained on vast amounts of human-produced text, to pass the US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

A passing grade for the exam, which is taken by medical students and physicians-in-training in the United States, is around 60 percent.

According to reports, in February, ChatGPT had achieved passing or near passing results.

In a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Google researchers said that Med-PaLM had achieved 67.6 percent on USMLE-style multiple choice questions.

To identify and cut down on hallucinations the name for when AI models offer up false information Google said it had developed a new evaluation benchmark.

Karan Singhal, a Google researcher and lead author of the new study says, “The team has used the benchmark to test a newer version of their model with super exciting results.”