Can an AI chatbot act as your therapist? 93 million bucks says the answer is yes.
That’s how much money Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Radical Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, and other firms have poured into Slingshot AI, a mental health startup from Casper co-founder Neil Parikh and AI researcher Daniel Cahn. The company just released its first AI chatbot tool, dubbed Ash, after 18 months of development with 50,000 beta users.
Parikh told Tech Brew that Slingshot was born from a desire to help ease a shortage of mental health providers. He hopes Ash might eventually expand access to certain mental health support to those with issues like depression, anxiety, or social isolation, freeing human therapists to focus on patients with the most serious needs.
No-man: But how can a technology that’s reportedly causing some users to lose their grip on reality also provide mental health assistance? One key, according to Parikh, is to equip the AI with the ability to push back on its users.
Popular LLMs have a well-known sycophancy problem; their built-in yes-man nature might inadvertently egg people down paths of delusion or paranoia. Parikh said Slingshot’s team has taken pains to ensure that Ash will challenge its users when the situation calls for it.
And unlike ChatGPT, Ash, which is available through text or voice, also ends conversational sessions after it deems a certain amount of progress is made, according to Parikh. “We don’t want to build your best friend or your companion,” he said. “The goal is for Ash to actually help you build relationships in the real world.”
Investment opportunities: Daisy Wolf, an a16z investment partner specializing in healthcare technology, said she sees mental health AI as a major investment opportunity, given the shortage of professionals in the space.
“The demand is massive, but we’ll never have enough trained professionals to meet it in our lifetimes. The only way to scale support meaningfully is through technology,” Wolf said in an email. “We believe generative AI has the potential to radically expand access to mental health support…but only if it’s built with deep clinical rigor and consumer trust at the core.”
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Bryan Kim, an a16z partner on the consumer AI side, said he sees the dataset that Slingshot has assembled as its competitive advantage.
“These guys are training the model, and they’re obtaining the data; that’s really hard,” Kim said. “That’s a really expensive and difficult path to go on, versus ‘Oh, here’s an LLM—let’s post-train it a little bit; let’s fork it a little bit.’”
The dataset: Ash consists of a foundation model fine-tuned on therapy data in “dozens of therapeutic styles and approaches” provided by partner organizations. That dataset is about 1% of the size of the base model’s, which is usually at least trillions of tokens—the equivalent of short words or parts of words. Slingshot also has a clinical team that writes custom responses to help train the model.
The model also uses reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to continually improve based on user interactions.
Mixed literature: Parikh pointed out that the quest to build a therapybot is far from new, dating back at least to a rudimentary system at MIT in the 1960s called ELIZA. It’s also not the only startup currently attempting mental health assistance with AI.
Recent studies have started to evaluate the usefulness of these tools (not including Ash), and the results have been mixed. A Stanford paper warned that AI therapy chatbots tend to be ineffective and dangerous. But a New England Journal of Medicine article from Dartmouth researchers found the technology “promising” for certain contexts, like anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
As Ash rolls out, Parikh said Slingshot will be collecting feedback from hundreds of customers every day about how it’s working and what to do differently. It’s free now, but the company plans to eventually monetize it.
“We just want to hear from people about what’s valuable to them and what they want out of a product like this,” he said.