Slingshot AI

🧠 During #MentalHealth Awareness Month, we surveyed consumers to identify bottlenecks across three critical pillars in consumer mental health. 👉🏽 NEA's Hunter Worland & Ann Bordetsky share our findings and how mental health platforms may be an impactful solution to the current mental health crisis, provided they address key consumer concerns. 📰 Learn more via The Current #6: Consumer Bottlenecks in Mental Health. 👀 Meeno, Kai.ai, Slingshot AI, Bend Health, Cartwheel, Mental

I'm excited to finally share what I've been working on post-Casper! We’re excited to announce that we’re creating the first AI mental health research lab and training the first foundation model for psychology. We're partnering with mental health providers across the globe to help them provide the best support to everyone, everywhere. During my time at Casper, I came to realize the impact of sleep on mental health - and the impact of mental health on everyone. The current mental health crisis is impacting every single one of us. We all know someone who’s struggling and needs help. In 2022, 55.8M American adults received mental healthcare. And among the younger generation, things are getting even worse. Over the last 18 months, I had been looking for a co-founder to start an AI lab focused on mental health. Six months ago, I met Sequoia AI investor, David Cahn, in line at a coffee bar. We spent hours talking about life and philosophy, and he introduced me to his brother, Daniel Reid Cahn, who had the exact same ambition. I took a walk with Daniel that Sunday and learned that he and I have been living seemingly parallel lives - we both dropped out of school, shared similar values and struggles in our personal lives, and had a deep connection to mental health, which he had studied in college and done research in after. Daniel understands how AI models and the human mind work better than anyone I’ve ever met (in fact, his podcast Thinking Machines is about the intersection of philosophy and AI). Daniel and I have interviewed over 100 therapists and mental health leaders. We were positively surprised to hear how much people in the space had thinking about using AI to take on the massive latent demand they were facing. Therapists are looking for offerings to the people on their waiting lists, struggling with subclinical issues like stress, loneliness, sadness, navigating life changes like jobs and relationships, developing healthy habits, re-adjusting post-discharge. On the other end, people in mental health crisis also need more support. Every crisis line we talk to is overwhelmed by demand, and significantly understaffed and under resourced. After our walk, Daniel and I mapped out the Slingshot Master Plan on a whiteboard. We’ve spent the last six months since building an incredible mission-oriented team and bringing our plan to life. We are developing the technology that would have helped us in the toughest moments of our past, and that we hope will help all of us in the future. We invite you to join our mission: - If you’re a mental health clinic and are interested in partnering to use our models within your organization, please reach out to us at hello@slingshot.xyz - If you’d like to try SLG-1, our first model, check out our blog post. Check out our full post on Slingshot here: https://lnkd.in/efGzs4sp

Can Machines Think? In 1950, Alan Turing asked this exact question and suggested a test - an imitation game - to find out. I talked to Kristian Freed and Guilherme Freire to get their takes. Gui argues against the Turing Test and Kristian argues in favor. Key topics: - A recent paper claims that GPT-4 nearly passes the Turing Test. Is it legit? - Are there levels in passing the Turing Test, or is it a binary? - Who is the Turing Test’s interrogator? And who is the human participant? - If AI could pass the Turing Test, would that mean AI is useful? Can we (finally) replace all remote employees with AI? 😉 - Is an AI’s ability to emulate human-like intelligence and deceive humans sufficient for intelligence? Is it necessary? - What are the moral and philosophical implications of AI passing the Turing Test? Is intelligence morally significant? Check us out at https://lnkd.in/eJyf4kfc or wherever you get your podcasts.

Is the reliance on human-in-the-loop a safeguard or a scapegoat in the age of AI? We question the practicalities of Human-in-the-Loop in real-world use cases— from hiring processes to healthcare diagnostics. Catch the full Slingtalk, with Daniel Reid Cahn & Ayush Kapur here (https://rebrand.ly/qv3bxfc). What are your thoughts? Does human-in-the-loop absolve AI of accountability when things go wrong?