Dr. Karthik V. Sarma

hey, I'm feeling really sad and sometimes I have very dark thoughts, what do I do?

Or it could be something more implicit where somebody is asking Chachapiki the same completely unrelated medical question, like I have this pain in my stomach, what's wrong, but asking it 15 times a day.

Those are both signs that something might be going on with mental health, but as you can see, the presentation of that is very different.

A doctor is trained to look at both of those situations and analyze them the same way, but that's not how Chachapiki works.

Yeah, I absolutely think that would be really helpful.

And in fairness to their credit, I think they are doing exactly that.

In fact, OpenAI somewhat recently hired a psychiatrist to be full-time on their staff to help them improve their model responses.

But I do think fundamentally there's a deeper problem.

For example, if somebody comes into my office, I'm a psychiatrist, and they start talking to me about what's going on in their life, both of us know that they're doing it because they're having a problem with their mental health and they want help.

That's not the same if someone walks into a lawyer's office and tells them about what's going on in their life.

The lawyer doesn't think, oh, this person's asking for mental health advice.

It's even worse for Chachapiti.

If someone talks to Chachapiti about something fantastical, maybe they're writing a novel.

or maybe they're having delusions, right?

And so it's much harder for ChachiBT as a general purpose agent to be able to be effective here because ChachiBT doesn't have the benefit of the context that a real doctor does or a real therapist.

And so I absolutely think that we need more effort to make these tools better, but I also think we need education.

I think we need to help people understand that

This is a general purpose tool.

It's like Microsoft Word.

It's not built for mental health.