Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are backing a new venture, Thrive AI Health, which aims to build AI-powered assistant tech to promote healthier lifestyles.
Backing and Goals
Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global. The OpenAI Startup Fund is the early-stage venture fund closely associated. OpenAI, Thrive AI Health will seek to build an “AI health coach” to give personalized advice on sleep, food, fitness, stress management, and “connection,” according to a Monday press release.
Leadership and Strategic Investors
Thrive AI Health appointed DeCarlos Love as CEO; he previously led fitness and health experiences at Google’s Fitbit subsidiary, primarily on the tech giant’s Pixel Watch wearable. Thrive AI Health counts Walmart co-founder Helen Walton’s Alice L. Walton Foundation among its strategic investors, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine is one of Thrive AI Health’s initial health partners.
Thrive AI Health’s Vision
According to Huffington and Altman (via a Time op-ed), Thrive Health’s endgame is training an AI health “coach” on scientific research and medical data, leveraging a forthcoming health data platform and collaborations with partners, including Stanford Medicine. Huffington and Altman describe a virtual assistant on a smartphone app and in Thrive’s enterprise products that learns from users’ behaviors and offers real-time, health-related “nudges” and suggestions.
AI Personalized Health Recommendations
“Most health recommendations at the moment, though important, are generic,” Huffington and Altman write. “The health coach will make possible exact recommendations tailored to each person: swap your third-afternoon soda with water and lemon; go on a 10-minute walk with your child after you pick them up from school at 3:15 p.m.; start your wind-down routine at 10 p.m. since you have to get up at 6 a.m. the next morning to make your flight.”
Historical Challenges in AI Health Apps
Thrive AI Health is the latest in many tech industry efforts to create health-focused apps with AI-driven personalization. Many have encountered intractable business, technical, and regulatory hurdles.
IBM’s Watson Health
IBM launched Watson Health in 2015 to analyze reams of medical data far faster than any human doctor could, aiming to generate insights that could improve health outcomes. The company reportedly spent $4 billion beefing up Watson Health with acquisitions, but the tech proved to be inefficient at best — and harmful at worst.
Babylon Health’s Collapse
Elsewhere, Babylon Health, an NHS-partnered health chatbot startup that once promised to “automate away” consultations with medical professionals, collapsed after investigations revealed no evidence that the company’s tech worked better than a doctor. Once valued at over $4.2 billion, Babylon filed for bankruptcy in 2023, ultimately selling off its assets for less than $1 million.
AI Bias Concerns
In some cases, AI has been found to perpetuate negative stereotypes within health research and the broader medical community. For example, a recent study showed that OpenAI ’s-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, often answers questions relating to kidney function and skin thickness in a way that reinforces false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people.
Promoting a Thoughtful Approach
To stave off critics, Huffington and Altman are positioning Thrive Health as a more careful, thoughtful approach to health than those that have come before it — a way to “democratize” health coaching and “address growing health inequities” in an ostensibly secure, privacy-sensitive way. The company has named Gbenga Ogedegbe, director of NYU Langone’s Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, an advisor.
Privacy Concerns and Data Security
But if history is any indication, it could prove exceedingly difficult for Thrive AI Health to strike a balance between “democratizing” its tech and preserving patient privacy.
In 2016, the Royal Free NHS Trust in London passed data on more than a million patients to Google’s AI division, DeepMind, without the patient’s knowledge or consent. Recent wide-scale data breaches, like the UnitedHealth and 23andMe scandals, show the danger inherent in entrusting sensitive health data to third parties.
Uphill Climb Ahead
Perhaps Thrive AI Health will avoid the pitfalls of its rivals and progenitors. However, it’s likely to be an uphill climb regardless—and closely watched by skeptics.
