The key difference between frontier language models and Therabot, Heinz said, is that his team’s technology is “purpose-built” before it’s deployed for human use, meaning the chatbot is trained for the specific purpose of being a therapeutic tool. Frontier models, like ChatGPT, are designed to let users create their own experiences with limited guardrails.
‘An unexpected antidote to a growing mental health crisis’ (SFGate – August 12, 2026 – Full article)
Article Excerpt: Michael Heinz, a psychiatrist at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, has been developing [with Nicholas Jacobson] its therapy chatbot, called Therabot, since 2019 — three years before OpenAI released ChatGPT. Initially, his team was focused on providing a solution to disparities in access to mental health care. But with the rise in frontier models being used for therapy, Heinz told SFGATE there’s an even greater need to develop tools that are specifically designed to provide mental health care.
“I think that these digital therapeutics powered with generative AI are very promising, have a lot of promise for kind of a scalable way to deliver really, really effective high fidelity interventions that are rooted in evidence,” Heinz said.