The origin of Ash: Slingshot's founders in conversation with One Mind
In an interview with the One Mind Accelerator, Slingshot AI co-founders Daniel Cahn and Neil Parikh explain how and why they built Ash — a foundation model for psychology trained on human therapy — and their vision for making quality mental health support available to everyone at a cost that "rounds to zero."
• Origin: Neil Parikh (a Casper co-founder drawn in through the sleep–mental-health link) and Daniel Cahn (a machine-learning engineer who researched AI for mental health) set out to build the same company and sketched it on a three-hour walk.
• The build is a "foundation model for psychology" trained on one of the largest, most diverse datasets of human therapy, via three steps: a large dataset through partnerships, clinical fine-tuning that converts human therapy into AI therapy, and reinforcement learning with a value model that reads in-conversation signals.
• Their thesis on connection: the hard part isn't information, it's finding someone who truly connects with you — so the model learns from the full range of styles (CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, psychodynamic, motivational interviewing) and tailors to each person.
• On the therapeutic alliance: "patients know how it's going" — when users feel they're working on the right things and collaborating on goals, that correlates with success, so the user (not a clinician) defines whether Ash is working.
• Product and vision: a direct-to-consumer app over text or voice, with memory, weekly insights, and trend-spotting — aimed at "Netflix-scale" access where cost effectively rounds to zero.
