In 2020 I caught up with a blue chip VC and argued that the Alma/Headway/Grow model was going to be the best way to increase access to mental health and eventually AI mental health The VC published a post about why AI therapists were the future As the son of a therapist I’ve heard so many stories of even bad therapists or so called “coaches” pulling things off the rails for people and making it hard for them to recover AI feels like the bad therapists at scale and with incentives that might not be aligned I’d rather see a world in which the AI is trained off the top therapist interactions + best practices from research vs. a free for all with people communicating with the models that want to maintain a sticky relationship over outcomes Longterm I think we can dial it in where the AI will be a net positive But we’re now living in the moment of seeing the negative and dangerous results of poorly aligned incentives Hope teams are very focused on improving this with strong ethics and morals around it