In this short film, Slingshot AI founders Daniel Cahn and Neil Parikh and Clinical Lead Dr. Derrick Hull explain why they're building Ash — a foundation model for psychology trained on large-scale behavioral health data — to reach the many people the traditional therapy system leaves behind.
• The access gap is severe: provider-to-need ratios can run as high as 1:30,000, and of the \~55.8 million Americans who attended a therapy session in 2022, most went only once because it wasn't the right fit.
• Ash is a purpose-built foundation model for psychology; general-purpose LLMs are too agreeable and move too fast (jumping to goal-setting right after someone shares a loss), so training on therapeutic data teaches the model that change and healing are hard.
• Of \~100 therapists the team consulted early on, only about 3% were opposed — many see AI as a way to scale help they can't deliver alone.
• A user with stage 4 cancer, long denied therapy access, used Ash to process anticipatory grief — and brought her husband in too, reconnecting them through a hard season.
