Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are lending their support to a new venture, Thrive AI Health, which aims to develop AI-powered assistant technology to promote healthier lifestyles. This initiative is backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm, Thrive Global, and the OpenAI Startup Fund, an early-stage venture fund closely tied to OpenAI.
Thrive AI Health plans to create an “AI health coach” that provides personalized advice on sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection, as stated in a press release issued on Monday. DeCarlos Love, previously leading fitness and health experiences at Google’s Fitbit subsidiary, particularly on the Pixel Watch wearable, has been appointed CEO of Thrive AI Health. The Alice L. Walton Foundation, founded by Walmart co-founder Helen Walton, is among its strategic investors, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine is one of its initial health partners.
The amount of capital invested in Thrive AI Health by its backers has not been disclosed. We have reached out for clarification and will update this post with further information as it becomes available.
In a Time op-ed, Huffington and Altman described Thrive AI Health’s goal of training an AI health coach based on scientific research and medical data. This will be supported by a forthcoming health data platform and collaborations with partners, including Stanford Medicine. The envisioned virtual assistant will be available via a smartphone app and Thrive’s enterprise products, learning from users’ behaviors to provide real-time health-related nudges and suggestions.
“Most health recommendations currently are generic,” Huffington and Altman wrote. “The AI health coach will offer very precise recommendations tailored to each person: for example, replace your third afternoon soda with water and lemon, take a 10-minute walk with your child after school, or start your wind-down routine at 10 p.m. to prepare for an early flight.”
Thrive AI Health joins a long list of tech industry efforts to create health-focused apps with AI-driven personalization. Previous endeavors have faced significant business, technical, and regulatory hurdles. For instance, IBM’s Watson Health division, launched in 2015, aimed to analyze vast amounts of medical data to improve health outcomes but struggled with inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Similarly, Babylon Health, an NHS-partnered health chatbot startup, collapsed after investigations revealed it did not perform better than a doctor, ultimately filing for bankruptcy in 2023.
AI in healthcare has also been criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes. A study showed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT reinforced false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people regarding kidney function and skin thickness. Another study found that even trained clinicians can be misled by biased AI models, highlighting the difficulty of eliminating such biases.
To address potential criticisms, Huffington and Altman are positioning Thrive AI Health as a thoughtful and careful approach to health technology, aiming to “democratize” health coaching and reduce health inequities while ensuring privacy and security. The company has named Gbenga Ogedegbe, director of NYU Langone’s Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, as an advisor. They claim that the research data used by Thrive AI Health’s products will be peer-reviewed and that users will have control over the information that informs the AI health coach’s recommendations.
However, balancing the democratization of health technology with preserving patient privacy remains a significant challenge. Historical issues, such as Google’s DeepMind controversy in 2016 and recent data breaches like those involving UnitedHealth and 23andMe, underscore the risks of entrusting sensitive health data to third parties.
While Thrive AI Health aims to avoid the pitfalls of its predecessors, its journey will likely be closely monitored by skeptics and industry observers alike.
