Slingshot is an AI research company that develops technology to increase global access to mental healthcare. The company aims to help humans feel and perform better, be more connected, and adapt to future challenges in mental health support.

Slingshot AI

Slingshot

About Us
We're a team of machine learning and product engineers training task-specific generative models for psychology. Our mission is to use AI to make mental healthcare more accessible and to help people change their lives in the ways they want. We partner with organizations around the globe and power use cases, including AI-assisted crisis text response and AI counseling, while securing best-in-class datasets to power our models.

Success to us means every human being in need of support having somewhere to go. We're a well-funded, seed-stage startup backed by top-tier tech investors involved in ElevenLabs, Captions, Shopify, Plaid, Notion, Canva, Twitch, Airtable, and others.

We're building a powerful team by empowering our engineers with the autonomy, flexibility, and resources to do their best work. We dream big and iterate fast. If that sounds like home, we'd love to hear from you.

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

🧠 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

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?

For people programming for machine learning…we’re excited to share our latest podcast episode! Daniel sits down with our talented Machine Learning Intern, Andy Lo (Cambridge) to discuss the world of ML programming and what lies on the horizon.

They discuss PyTorch vs. TensorFlow vs. Jax (vs. Mojo vs. Julia); no-code vs low-code vs pro-code for ML engineers; and the world of tooling for ML debugging and development!

An episode filled with insights for anyone writing (too much / not enough) ML code. Tune in on Spotify - https://lnkd.in/e3fGh-nP #slingtalks #machinelearning

Our latest #Slingtalk episode explores LLM inference speeds and its impact on how models are deployed and how software is built.

Some questions I’m left thinking about:

- Is fast model inference the real moat for the biggest LLM companies?
- Will “async” flows introduce entirely new software approaches, compared to real-time?
- How far away are hardware and software from being edge-inference ready?

Watch the full episode on Spotify (https://buff.ly/3ROpIZU)

🎙️SlingTalks drops on Spotify…brought to you by Slingshot! Check us out on https://buff.ly/46s0PHo and join the conversation!

We’re discussing the most important topics going through the minds of ML developers everywhere. This week: Why the heck did Meta open source Llama 2? 

#slingtalks #engineeringinsights #meta #llama2 #machinelearning #artificialintelligence #opensourcemodels

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