In a wide-ranging Machine Learning Street Talk conversation with host Tim Scarfe, Slingshot AI co-founder and CEO Daniel Cahn lays out the thinking behind Ash. He frames the mission as building "AI that can help people change their minds and change their lives in the ways they want to," against an access gap he puts at roughly one provider for every thousand or more people seeking care, with "no real path other than AI to expand access." Cahn argues that a credible AI therapist cannot be a prompt on top of a general model: "you can't prompt an alien." Instead Slingshot invests in continued pretraining and supervised fine-tuning, learning from real interaction data and outcomes, with the therapeutic alliance and a person's sense of autonomy, competency, and relatedness as the targets. He stresses an unusually serious posture toward responsibility, privacy, and safety, noting the team is built to take the risks seriously where others have not. Cahn's own background spans philosophy of psychology and AI research, alongside co-founder Neil Parikh of Casper.