# Old CNN beats frontier LLMs on skin cancer diagnosis

A Hacker News post reports that a 10-year-old convolutional neural network outperformed frontier large language models in diagnosing skin cancer. The comparison matters because it questions whether newer general-purpose LLMs are best for specialized medical image tasks and highlights the value of purpose-built models.

**Importance:** 3/5

## Sources

### Technology
- [Hacker News](https://lynchlab.net/llm-skin-cancer) — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 17:15:38 +0000