In a splashy op-ed in Time published this summer, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Thrive AI Health, a venture with the goal of building an AI-powered assistant to promote healthier lifestyles. Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive AI Health would seek to build an “AI health coach” to give personalized advice on sleep, food, fitness, stress management, and “connection,” Huffington and Altman wrote.
Months later, Thrive AI Health’s assistant appears to be very much a work in progress.
TechCrunch discovered a demo of a minimum viable version of Thrive AI Health’s product on the company’s official website. Though largely nonfunctional, the demo has a working UI similar to chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It suggests prompts like “Can you analyze my sleep patterns?” and “What were my [sic] heart rate over the last week?,” and offers fields for personal health information like age, weight, and pre-existing conditions.
“Start exploring our features to track your health journey, log your activities, and get personalized insights,” a welcome message reads. “We’re here to help you thrive every step of the way!”
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Thrive AI Health has been unusually quiet since its unveiling four months ago. The company’s CEO, DeCarlos Love, hasn’t posted on X since July. And, besides launching a sign-up for a beta program, Thrive AI Health has kept press engagements to a minimum.
A press release in October mentions that subscribers to Function Health, a premium personal health management platform, will be able to share their data with Thrive’s health coach for “hyper-personalized behavior change recommendations” and “real-time guidance tailored to their unique health patterns” if they wish.
According to LinkedIn, Thrive AI Health, which claims to be hiring on its website, has fewer than 10 employees.
As we noted in July, Thrive AI Health is the latest in a long string of tech industry efforts to create health-focused apps with AI-driven personalization. Many have run up against intractable business, technical, and regulatory hurdles. Altman and Huffington’s involvement lent weight to Thrive. But it’s also sure to increase scrutiny on it.
