AI leaders are increasingly optimistic about the technology’s potential in healthcare, especially when it comes to personalized bots that can understand and address individuals’ health concerns.
OpenAI and Arianna Huffington launch joint funding initiative Development of an “AI Health Coach” through Thrive AI Health. time In a magazine op-ed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Huffington said the bot would be trained on “the best peer-reviewed science” in addition to “the personal biometric, lab data, and other health data that users choose to share.”
The company appointed DeCarlos Love, a former Google executive who previously worked on Fitbit and other wearables, as CEO. Thrive AI Health also has research partnerships with several academic institutions and medical centers, including the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. (The Alice L. Walton Foundation is also a strategic investor in Thrive AI Health.)
AI-powered health coaches are becoming a hot trend: Fitbit is working on an AI chatbot coach, and Whoop has added a ChatGPT-powered “coach” to give users more insight into their health metrics. In San Francisco, the obsession with health data is the norm; you can’t go far without seeing someone wearing an Oura Ring or boasting about the sleep data from their Eight Sleep mattress.
Thrive AI Health’s goal is to provide powerful insights to people who don’t have access to it otherwise, like a single mom looking for easy gluten-free meal ideas for her kids, or an immunocompromised person who needs quick advice between doctor’s appointments. Personally, I use it to ask about unusual headaches, rather than relying on WebMD’s often alarming diagnoses.
But it’s not hard to think of reasons to be cautious: Sharing health data with anyone other than your doctor exposes it to risk, plus bots could provide dangerous or even deadly misinformation, plus there’s the risk that without human oversight, quality care could slip into rapid, incomplete responses.
This bot is still in its early stages. Atomic Habits Thrive AI Health’s approach is to gently encourage small changes in five key areas of life: sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection. It aims to have a positive impact on people with chronic conditions like heart disease by making small adjustments, such as suggesting a 10-minute walk after picking up the kids from school. It doesn’t claim to be ready to offer an actual diagnosis like a doctor, but instead aims to guide users towards a healthier lifestyle.
“AI is already dramatically accelerating the rate of scientific progress in medicine, delivering breakthroughs in drug development and diagnostics, and increasing the pace of scientific progress on diseases such as cancer,” the editorial reads.
Advancing the healthcare system with AI could be extremely beneficial to society if it actually works. While a bot that tells you to get more sleep isn’t quite the same as an AI miracle cure, there are some promising AI advances in medicine, such as research suggesting that radiologists supported by specialized AI tools can detect breast cancer in mammogram images as accurately as two radiologists. There are also AI-designed drugs currently in clinical trials, including one for treating fibrosis, and in 2020 a team of MIT researchers used AI to discover an antibiotic that can kill E. coli.
The challenge for Altman and Huffington is navigating the limits of AI’s power while building trust in the products that handle people’s most private information.
