OpenAI collaborates with Ariana Huffington

OpenAI’s start-up fund is backing Huffington Post and (mental wellness firm) Thrive Global founder Arianna Huffington’s latest venture: To build an AI-powered health coach (Thrive AI Health) that provides tailored advice to users, opening up access to healthcare, promoting healthier lifestyles, and reducing chronic illness.  

What will the AI health coach do?

Thrive AI Health will use data from peer-reviewed science, biometrics, lab, and other medical data, users' personal preferences and goals, and Thrive and OpenAI resources–such as Thrive’s leading behavior change methodology, ‘Microsteps’–to provide hyper-personalized advice, coaching, suggestions, and prompts around five interconnected daily behaviors that govern our health: Sleep, food, fitness, stress management, and connection.

“Most health recommendations at the moment, though important, are generic. The AI health coach will make very precise 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.”

The end goal for Thrive AI Health is to make healthcare more accessible, and ultimately reduce chronic illness–such as diabetes, depression, and heart disease–which, in the US alone, affects 129M, costing healthcare services around $3.6 trillion every year.

"So much of the conversation around AI has been about how much time it will save us and how productive it will make us. But health is also what happens between doctor visits. AI will serve as part of the critical infrastructure of a much more effective healthcare system that supports everyday people's health in an ongoing way.”