Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington have joined forces to create Thrive AI Health, an AI coach using wearables data.
Personal health AI is booming right now, with many companies — both startups and established players like Whoop, Fitbit, Google, Samsung, and Oura — looking to blend wearables with AI.
It’s all a quest to solve the same problem. How wearables can actually create positive change.
Enter Thrive AI Health, notable for being backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and, curiously, Arianna Huffington.
And the company is putting together a serious line-up, with the CEO set to be DeCarlos Love, a former product leader at Google and Fitbit.
As you’d have gathered, Thrive AI will leverage generative AI to offer users helpful nudges for lifestyle improvement.
According to a report in The Verge:
“The bot is still in its early stages, adopting an Atomic Habits approach. Its goal is to gently encourage small changes in five key areas of your life: sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection. By making minor adjustments, such as suggesting a 10-minute walk after picking up your child from school, Thrive AI Health aims to positively impact people with chronic conditions like heart disease. It doesn’t claim to be ready to provide real diagnoses like a doctor would but instead aims to guide users into a healthier lifestyle.”
The Verge
We have to say we like this approach in theory – and it takes a grown-up approach to behavior change.
But can AI actually deliver this?
When we’ve seen this kind of thing in the past, AI has offered little more than obvious factoids, usually delivered at the worst possible time. Another push notification, among all the other notifications that clog up our digital lives.
So not only would Thrive AI have to build a meaningful and insightful health service, but also completely overhaul the social engineering, which has so badly failed in the past.
But OpenAI is behind the Whoop Coach, which is one of the smarter AI chatbots we’ve tried. The key difference is that you can only ask Whoop Coach questions, so it’s tet to prove it can be a proactive and effective assistant.
Over to you, Sam Altman.
