Imagine an AI doctor that not only diagnoses your illness but also asks insightful follow-up questions just like a human physician. That's the promise of MEDIQ, a groundbreaking project pushing the boundaries of AI in healthcare. Researchers are tackling a critical challenge: current AI models often struggle to handle incomplete information. They are trained to answer any question thrown at them, even if they lack the necessary context, which is a major roadblock to reliable real-world applications. MEDIQ introduces a new approach. It simulates real-life clinical interactions using two key components: a Patient System and an Expert System. The Patient System mimics a real patient, providing answers based on a complete medical record. The Expert System, acting as the AI doctor, receives initial patient information and can ask follow-up questions to gather more details before making a diagnosis. This interactive back-and-forth is where the innovation lies. The AI doctor must determine if it has enough information to make a confident decision. If not, it formulates a relevant question, receives a response from the Patient System, and integrates that new information into its reasoning. Initial tests using powerful models like Llama-3 and GPT-4 revealed a surprising finding. Simply giving these AIs the *ability* to ask questions actually *decreased* their diagnostic accuracy! Turns out, teaching AI when to ask and what to ask is harder than expected. But there's good news. The researchers developed clever strategies, like having the AI generate a rationale for its confidence level. This led to a significant 22.3% improvement in diagnostic accuracy. While promising, there's still room for growth. Even the most advanced MEDIQ system hasn't fully closed the gap compared to scenarios where the AI receives all patient information upfront. The next hurdle? Improving the AI’s ability to understand conversations, filter irrelevant details, and formulate truly insightful questions. MEDIQ offers a glimpse into a future where AI doctors actively engage in the diagnostic process, ensuring they have the information they need to make reliable decisions, even when facing incomplete initial details. This is a crucial step towards more reliable, human-like AI in healthcare and beyond.