AI’s death prediction tool claims remarkable accuracy

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have developed an AI-based death predictor, claiming high accuracy in forecasting individuals’ lifespans. Modeled after ChatGPT, the AI Life2vec system utilizes personal information like health, education, occupation, and income for its predictions. Drawing on Denmark’s population data, the model refines its accuracy. Analyzing health and labor market data from 2008 to 2020 involving 6 million people, the death predictor achieves a 78 percent accuracy rate.
“We use the technology behind ChatGPT (something called transformer models) to analyze human lives by representing each person as the sequence of events that happen in their life,” Sune Lehmann, lead author of the December 2023 study “Using sequence of life events to predict human lives,” told The New York Post.

“We use the fact that, in a certain sense, human lives share a similarity with language,” explained Mr Lehmann. “Just like words follow each other in sentences, events follow each other in human lives.”

“Mortality prediction is an often-used task within statistical modeling that is closely related to other health prediction tasks and therefore requires life2vec to model the progression of individual health sequences as well as labor history to predict the correct outcome successfully,” the authors of the study wrote.

Unlike ChatGPT, which focuses on crafting creative text or navigating professional hurdles, Life2vec takes a different approach. This AI delves into the personal histories of individuals, analyzing details like health, education, career, and income. Through this deep examination, Life2vec aims to predict not just career success or fashion choices but something far more profound: the very outcome of a person’s life. It’s like holding a mirror to the past, seeking to glimpse the future it reflects.