The AI health coach from OpenAI and Arianna Huffington sounds like it’s still out of shape

The AI health coach hyped up by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington earlier this summer as Thrive AI Health may not be ready to come off the bench just yet, as first found in what seems to be a brief and inadvertently released demo by TechCrunch. The health data tracker uncovered seems like a limited version of ChatGPT centered on sharing information gathered from your health wearables and leveraged to design workout routines.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s basically the same as a million other health apps, not to mention those services built into Apple and Android mobile devices. Personalizing (and misspelling) suggested prompts like “Can you analyze my sleep patterns?” and “What were my [sic] heart rate over the last week?” doesn’t come off as much of a revolution in personal health and wellness the way Thrive’s backers envisioned.

Huffington’s wellness technology firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund set up Thrive AI Health in the summer to eventually offer personalized health coaching with expert-level guidance. Altman and Huffington boasted in a shared op-ed that the AI choice could help reduce chronic diseases by promoting healthier daily behaviors.

The personal suggestions are supposedly created from peer-reviewed scientific research as well as biometric data. Thrive AI Health hired former Google product management leader DeCarlos Love as CEO, which made sense as he had overseen Fitbit, the Pixel Watch, and Wear OS.

Coach Crunch

“Thrive AI Health Coach is the product to solve the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions by providing personalized, proactive, and data-driven coaching across the five daily behaviors,” Love said in a statement when the company launched. “This is how it will improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and significantly impact chronic diseases worldwide.”

Since then, the company hasn’t said much about its plans, and the website doesn’t offer anything beyond a beta access signup sheet for those interested in trying out the AI coach. TechCrunch noted that the only recent mention of the company was when personal health management platform Function Health cited Thrive AI Health as part of a deal where members can share their data with the AI health coach for better advice.

Using AI to personalize health and wellness makes sense, but it may be harder to embed in a product than Altman and Huffington realized. If rumors that developers are struggling to make the next generation of AI models meet expectations are true, Thrive AI may not be as close to a full release as the founders hope.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He’s since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he’s continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.