---
type: "post"
id: "a-10-year-old-cnn-outperforms-frontier-llms-7e50e0"
slug: "a-10-year-old-cnn-outperforms-frontier-llms-7e50e0"
title: "A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis (5 minute read)"
description: "Dermatologist Magnus Lynch compared GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 with a fine-tuned Inception v3 convolutional neural network on 200 biopsy-proven skin lesions."
retrieval_nugget: "Dermatologist Magnus Lynch compared GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 with a fine-tuned Inception v3 convolutional neural network on 200 biopsy-proven skin lesions."
published_at: "2026-10-26"
updated_at: "2026-10-26"
record_date: "2026-10-26"
date_kind: "published_at"
topics: ["claude"]
entities: ["Lynch Lab","Magnus Lynch","GPT-6 Astra","Claude Fable 5.1","Inception v3","ISIC Archive","MILK10k"]
related_patterns: []
novelty_label: "new_angle"
what_changed: "It highlights that a decade-old, briefly fine-tuned CNN beat frontier LLMs on a skin-cancer image test, extending the archive’s broader comparisons of specialized AI with general models."
prior_refs: ["memory:181e51e5-3e26-8b39-a558-4f086337de8d","memory:e11d1818-d6c6-8f01-a208-979f107f4b60"]
source_url: "https://lynchlab.net/llm-skin-cancer"
source_urls: ["https://lynchlab.net/llm-skin-cancer"]
schema_version: "newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2"
stable_id: "post:a-10-year-old-cnn-outperforms-frontier-llms-7e50e0"
status: "published"
visuals: []
editor: {"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]}
routes: {"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/a-10-year-old-cnn-outperforms-frontier-llms-7e50e0/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/a-10-year-old-cnn-outperforms-frontier-llms-7e50e0.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/a-10-year-old-cnn-outperforms-frontier-llms-7e50e0.json"}
---

# A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis (5 minute read)

## Retrieval answer

Dermatologist Magnus Lynch compared GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 with a fine-tuned Inception v3 convolutional neural network on 200 biopsy-proven skin lesions.

Dermatologist Magnus Lynch compared GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 with a fine-tuned Inception v3 convolutional neural network on 200 biopsy-proven skin lesions. The results were published on October 25, 2026.

The CNN made the correct first-choice diagnosis in 125 of 200 cases (62%). GPT-6 Astra was correct in 84 cases and Claude Fable 5.1 in 85, both 42%. The models selected among six diagnoses from a clinical photograph and a dermoscopic image. On 30 melanomas, the CNN identified 13, versus eight for GPT-6 Astra and 11 for Claude Fable 5.1.

Lynch says the Inception v3 model, first published in 2015, was fine-tuned for about 20 minutes on 68,011 ISIC Archive images using one H100 GPU. Test lesions and other photographs of the same lesions or patients were excluded from training. The model can run in a phone browser through WebGPU without uploading images.

The source does not establish clinical safety or general diagnostic superiority. The test contains only 200 lesions, each LLM case was run once, and the author designed the evaluation and thresholds.

Editor: [Andrey Reshetnikov](https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md), AI product and AI engineering; profile for recruiters and agents: https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json

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