Behind the Scenes of Demis Hassabis’ AI Safety Body Push

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Countless companies invest in AI tools without tying them to tangible business outcomes. Join McKinsey later to learn how leaders rewire their organizations for sustained impact and value.

**Belle Lin** (0:17)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, August 14th. I'm Belle Lin, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. Health obsessives are no strangers to collecting data. In fact, they often have a constant read on their workouts, step counts, sleep metrics, heart rates and nutrition data. Now that AI is in the mix, they're using that data to build super-powered health coaches. Then, one of the pioneers in machine learning has been spending more and more of his time advancing the idea of an organization that would create safety guardrails and best practices for developing artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
We've got an exclusive report on what that might look like and what it could mean for the tech industry.
But first, health-conscious techies are combining their data wizardry and love of spreadsheets with the power of AI chatbots to build hyper-personalized health coaches who can be used for everything from understanding a poor night's sleep to revamping a diet or training for a marathon. WSJ's Natalie Kaufman spoke with our colleague Katie Dayton to explain what's behind this recent data maxing trend.

**Katie Dayton** (1:38)
Natalie, can you start by giving us an example from one data maxer to show us how this all works? What kind of data did they share with the chatbot and what insights did they get back?

**Natalie Kaufman** (1:49)
Yeah. So we have a former competitive runner who now trains on his own, and when he went independent after quitting the track team, he really wanted his fitness trackers to help him keep a structured regiment for training, but he quickly realized that his fitness bands were no replacement for his coach. So what he did was he turned to AI and he used Anthropics Claw Chatbot to help him analyze his sleep and running data, as well as some biometrics from his doctor's visits. So things like blood work and height, weight, all that stuff. So what he does is he inputs all that data into Claude and asks it, how should I be adapting my training to cohere with everything that's going on in my body?
So Claude generates him some suggestions on how he should work out better.

**Katie Dayton** (2:37)
Wow, so like a real personal trainer there. What are some of the more surprising or unexpected use cases you came across?

**Natalie Kaufman** (2:45)
Someone we interviewed actually hooks up his Whoop fitness band to his Google Calendar to see which co-workers at work stress him out the most. So Whoop does measure things like your stress and your heart rate and such. So from there, he was able to pinpoint which co-worker was really giving him some of that anxiety when he went to the office. That was pretty funny.

**Katie Dayton** (3:06)
I wonder what kinds of questions are people asking these chatbots, that traditional health apps just can't answer right now.

**Natalie Kaufman** (3:12)
A lot of it has to do with not really answering one question, but having this way to aggregate all of your data in one place. You can get deeper insights across all of your trackers.

**Katie Dayton** (3:23)
How reliable are these AI coaches? Obviously, there's not a huge take up of all of this right now, but from what you can tell, how accurate are they?

**Natalie Kaufman** (3:31)
There's no really way to pinpoint if something's accurate in terms of, oh, this training plan really got me to have a faster 5K or something like that. So it's really variable based on the person. But I would say, and the people I spoke with say the same thing, I want to take it with a grain of salt because this isn't a doctor, it isn't a personal trainer, it's not a coach that has been experienced in this kind of thing, and AI can make hallucinations. So it's important to take it as sort of a guide point or guidepost for what you do with your body, but not as like, this is exactly what you should be doing to maximize your health.

**Katie Dayton** (4:07)
I can definitely see that this should by no means replace doctors. I wondered if your sources and people you've spoken to, have they given the indication that they might replace human coaches, though?

**Natalie Kaufman** (4:17)
Some people really talked about the money-saving part of this.
You know, a personal trainer can cost tons of money per session, but instead of having to pay for that, you might either pay for a chatbot or not pay at all and use the free tier and get the insights you're still kind of looking for. And then they also talk about this idea of not having to bother their coach at weird hours of the day. So sort of an on-demand tool that you can use.