Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the co-founding of a company called Thrive AI Health, which aims to use artificial intelligence technology to help people develop healthier lifestyles.
Thrive AI Health was jointly funded by Huffington's health company Thrive Global and the OpenAI Venture Foundation. It is committed to creating an "AI health coach" that provides personalized advice based on the user's sleep, diet, fitness, stress management and social situations. The company's CEO DeCarlos Love previously served as the head of fitness and health experience at Fitbit, a wearable device company under Google.
It is not clear how much investment Thrive AI Health has received. According to Huffington and Altman in a commentary in Time magazine, Thrive AI Health's goal is to train an "AI health coach" based on scientific research and medical data, and plans to work with institutions such as Stanford University School of Medicine to build a health data platform.They envision creating a smartphone app and virtual assistant integrated into Thrive's enterprise products that would learn from user behavior and provide real-time health advice.
"Most current health advice, while important, is overly general," Huffington and Altman wrote.AI Health CoachCan provide more accurate and personalized suggestionsFor example, it can suggest that users replace their third glass of soda with lemonade at 3 p.m., or take their children for a 10-minute walk at 3:15 after school, or remind users to start relaxing at 10 p.m. because they need to get up at 6 a.m. the next morning to catch a flight.
Huffington and Altman position Thrive AI Health as a more careful and thoughtful way to manage your health than before, claiming that its products will "democratize health coaching" and "address growing health inequities" in a secure, privacy-focused way. The company has named Gbenga Ogedegbe, director of the Institute for Excellence in Health Equity at NYU Langone, as an advisor and promised that its products use peer-reviewed research data, and that users will have the final say over what information Thrive AI Health products use to provide advice.