A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

A dermatologist compared the diagnostic accuracy of GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 for skin cancer against a 10-year-old CNN, Inception v3. Across 200 lesions, Inception v3 achieved 62% accuracy, outperforming GPT-6 Astra (42%) and Claude Fable 5.1 (42%). For specific diagnoses like Melanoma, Inception v3 also showed higher accuracy (43%) compared to GPT-6 Astra (27%) and Claude Fable 5.1 (37%), indicating that the older CNN was superior.

This report uniquely compares frontier LLMs with a decade-old CNN, finding the older Inception v3 model superior for skin cancer diagnosis, unlike other studies focusing solely on new AI performance.