Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are heavily backing a brand new company called Thrive AI Health, which goals to develop AI-powered assistive technologies to advertise healthier lifestyles.
Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund, the early-stage enterprise fund closely aligned with OpenAI, Thrive AI Health will seek to construct an “AI health coach” that gives personalized advice on sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management and “connection,” based on a Press release Published Monday.
DeCarlos Love previously led fitness and health experiences at GoogleThe Fitbit subsidiary, which is primarily answerable for the tech giant's Pixel Watch wearable, has been named CEO. Thrive AI Health's strategic investors include Walmart co-founder Helen Walton's Alice L. Walton Foundation, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine is one in all Thrive AI Health's first healthcare partners.
It wasn't immediately clear how much capital Thrive AI Health's backers have invested. We've asked for clarification and can update this post once we receive a response.
According to Huffington and Altman (via a Time op-ed), Thrive AI Health's ultimate goal is to coach an AI health coach using scientific research and medical data, leveraging a future health data platform and collaborations with partners like Stanford Medicine. Huffington and Altman describe a form of virtual assistant in a smartphone app and in Thrive's enterprise products that learns from users' behavior and offers health-related “nudges” and suggestions in real time.
“Most health recommendations, while vital in the mean time, are general,” Huffington and Altman write. “The AI health coach will enable very precise recommendations tailored to every person: replace your third afternoon lemonade with water with lemon; take a 10-minute walk along with your child after picking them up from school at 3:15 p.m.; start your leisure routine at 10 p.m. because you’ve to stand up at 6 a.m. the subsequent morning to catch your flight.”
Thrive AI Health is the most recent in an extended line of efforts by the technology industry to construct health-focused apps with AI-driven personalization. Many of those apps have encountered insurmountable business, technical and regulatory hurdles.
Founded in 2015, IBM's Watson Health division was designed to research vast amounts of medical data – much faster than any human doctor – to achieve insights that might improve health outcomes. The company According to reports spent $4 billion to strengthen Watson Health through acquisitions, however the technology proved inefficient at best – and within the worst case harmful.
Babylon Health, an NHS-linked healthcare chatbot startup that when promised it could “automate” consultations with medical professionals, collapsed following investigations. revealed that there was no evidence that the corporate's technology worked higher than a health care provider. Babylon, once valued at over $4.2 billion, filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and eventually sold its assets for lower than $1 million.
In some cases, AI has been shown to perpetuate negative stereotypes in health research and the broader medical community. For example, recently study showed that OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT often answers questions on kidney function and skin thickness in ways in which reinforce misconceptions about biological differences between blacks and whites.
Even trained clinicians may be deceived by biased AI models, one other study found – suggesting that it could be difficult to eradicate these prejudices.
To fend off critics, Huffington and Altman are positioning Thrive AI Health as a more careful, thoughtful approach to health than its predecessors—a strategy to “democratize” health coaching and “address growing health disparities”—in a seemingly protected and privacy-friendly way. The company has appointed Gbenga Ogedegbe, director of NYU Langone's Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, as an adviser and claims that the research data utilized by its products is “peer-reviewed”—and that users have the ultimate say on what information Thrive AI Health's products use to craft their recommendations.
But if history is any indication, Thrive AI Health may find it extremely difficult to strike a balance between “democratizing” its technology and protecting patient privacy.
In 2016, it was revealed that Google's AI division DeepMind had shared data from over 1,000,000 patients without their knowledge or consent as a part of an app development project on the Royal Free NHS Trust in London. Recent large-scale data thefts corresponding to the scandals involving UnitedHealth and 23andMe show the hazards of entrusting confidential health data to 3rd parties.
Perhaps Thrive AI Health will manage to avoid the pitfalls of its competitors and predecessors, but it’ll likely still be a troublesome road ahead – and skeptics will probably be watching closely.
