The performance of ChatGPT and ERNIE Bot in surgical resident examinations.

Objective: To assess the application of these two large language models (LLMs) for surgical resident examinations and to compare the performance of these LLMs with that of human residents.

Methods: In this study, 596 questions with a total of 183,556 responses were first included from the Medical Vision World, an authoritative medical education platform across China. Both Chinese prompted and non-prompted questions were input into ChatGPT-4.0 and ERNIE Bot-4.0 to compare their performance in a Chinese question database. Additionally, we screened another 210 surgical questions with detailed response results from 43 residents to compare the performance of residents and these two LLMs.

Results: There were no significant differences in the correctness of the responses to the 596 questions with or without prompts between the two LLMs (ChatGPT-4.0: 68.96 % [without prompt], 71.14 % [with prompts], p = 0.411; ERNIE Bot-4.0: 78.36 % [without prompt], 78.86 % [with prompts], p = 0.832), but ERNIE Bot-4.0 displayed higher correctness than ChatGPT-4.0 did (with prompts: p = 0.002; without prompts: p < 0.001). For another 210 questions with prompts, the two LLMs, especially ERNIE Bot-4.0 (ranking in the top 95 % of the 43 residents' scores), significantly outperformed the residents.

Conclusions: The performance of ERNIE Bot-4.0 was superior to that of ChatGPT-4.0 and that of residents on surgical resident examinations in a Chinese question database.