Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington (born 1950 in Athens) is a Cambridge-educated author and media entrepreneur who co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005 and sold it to AOL for $315 million in 2011. She left in 2016 to found Thrive Global, a behavior-change company built around her post-burnout gospel of sleep and wellbeing.

An AI coach for the “miracle drug” of behavior change

In July 2024, Huffington and Sam Altman co-authored a TIME op-ed announcing Thrive AI Health, a new company funded by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global to build a hyper-personalized AI health coach for sleep, food, fitness, stress and connection. The pair argued that AI-driven behavior change could bend the curve on chronic disease — with Huffington calling healthy behaviors the “miracle drug” that AI could finally democratize beyond people with trainers and nutritionists.

The venture hired Google wearables veteran DeCarlos Love as CEO and pitched itself especially at chronic-condition management for underserved communities. The rollout drew skepticism: when an early demo surfaced at a TechCrunch event in November 2024, the site described it as “bare-bones,” and public-health critics questioned whether nudges from a chatbot can move outcomes that decades of wellness apps have not.

Huffington has kept evangelizing AI’s role in health across OpenAI’s orbit and her own media, framing the technology not as a doctor replacement but as always-available scaffolding for daily habits — the least glamorous and, she argues, highest-leverage corner of medicine.