Emergency doctors make high-stakes decisions in fast-paced, often chaotic situations. They have to figure out which patient most urgently needs care, what’s wrong, and what to do next.

AI could lend a hand. In a series of challenging scenarios, OpenAI’s o1-preview model matched or exceeded doctors in clinical reasoning. Debuted in 2024, the AI is a large language model similar to those powering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other popular chatbots.

But when it was first developed, o1-preview differed in its ability to “think” through problems before answering. Such reasoning models explore multiple strategies, check themselves, and revise answers before offering a conclusion. This is a little closer to how humans solve problems.

Given case reports from an established database, o1-preview diagnosed the problem nearly 89 percent of the time.…