2/24/2025

- San Francisco

This week Meta announced its latest entry into the AI race with Brenee, an AI-powered mental health intervention bot for teens. The virtual therapist is being hailed as a master stroke that will catapult Meta into a leading position in the AI race against OPEN AI and Google. Brenee will only be available through Meta Quest VR headsets once it’s released to the public in June.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was uncharacteristically animated at the launch event for Brenee in San Francisco. He explained that teen mental health crises are “basically Meta’s unfair competitive advantage.” He pounded his chest and challenged the audience to “name one other company that has caused teen suicide and self harm to spike like we have. Seriously, name one! This is our bread and butter, people. The only company that can reverse the spell is the one who created it. That company is Meta, and that reverse-spell is Brenee. How you like me now!?” He then spiked a $962 Meta Quest Pro headset, which shattered upon impact. 

The response by tech analysts to Brenee has been widely positive. “Meta dominates the market for teen depression. Rates of teen suicide and self-harm nearly quintupled since the rollout of Facebook’s infinite scroll. This has been especially true for teenage girls. We’re excited to see Meta capitalize on its toe-hold in the depression market to leap forward in AI.” said tech analyst Lisa Copperman.

Brenee positions Meta’s VR headsets for explosive growth with teen girls, a demographic that the tech firm has not been able to crack with its metaverse hardware products.

Brenee has been trained on approximately 7,000,000 teen bullying events that occurred on Meta platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram over a 7 year time frame that culminated in teen harm. It also was trained with over 2 million Ted X talks from self-proclaimed “teen mental health thought leaders”. In this way Brenee knows exactly when and how to intervene when a bullying event threatens to escalate.

This article was originally going to be a huge shoutout to Memorial Sloan Kettering, the cancer treatment hospital in New York. Someone very close to me is being treated there right now (and making an amazing recovery) and I’ve been blown away by their human-first/ tech-second approach to patient care. Everything that makes healthcare in the United States a nightmare does not happen at MSK. Whenever there’s a message from a nurse or a doctor, MSK will call you first, and explain that there’s a message waiting for you in their app, and they will wait on the line while you open it. Any discrepancies with the insurer or other hospitals, MSK handles it. It’s been a beautiful reprieve from the emotionally tone-deaf deployment of AI-powered bots that are being trained to do things that only humans should do. 

The AI-alternative to MSK would be: 

• “If you’ve just received a fatal diagnosis of breast cancer press 4.” 

• “If you’re unable to get out of bed because you’re scared of dying, press 5.”

• “If your going to be evicted from your house because we screwed up your medical billing, press 6.” 

• “If you’d like to speak with Brenee, our AI-powered therapist about the trauma of fighting a life-threatening disease, press 7.”

• “Para continuar en español, oprima 8.”  

The dark side of the AI-boom we’re currently living through is that AI is being tasked with doing things that it should not do, in situations where humanity should be elevated. I’ve seen AI bots replace humans at a cardiologist office, an ophthalmologist, and a psychiatrist’s office. Somewhere, some CTO received a message that AI is hot, and started injecting it into conversations that people should have with people. Somewhere, that same CTO is jumping on an earnings call to see if using the term “AI-enablement” boosts the stock price.

People are very good at compassion, concern, and re-calibrating what they say as they read someone’s emotions. 

The most common question I get about my own business, Punks & Pinstripes, from VCs and entrepreneurs is “what technology are you using?” Punks & Pinstripes is a community of entrepreneurs and executives. Re-read that sentence: it’s a community. The minute we need an algorithm to connect the members who need help with the members who can help them is the minute we’ve grown too big. The minute we ask a bot to determine which applicant would be a good member, instead of asking the members to vet new applicants, then we’ve violated our human-first/ tech-second license to operate. It’s insane that the AI frenzy has reached such a fever pitch that healthcare institutions are inserting AI machines into emotional situations where the only acceptable response is human compassion. I’m incredibly grateful to Memorial Sloan Kettering for not succumbing to the pressure and keeping its technology under the hood where it belongs.

I hope that it goes without saying that Brenee is not real and that Meta has not created it. It’s a PsyFi dystopia that is 5% more insane than our current reality.

Hang out with Tanisha Robinson and ME Next Tuesday, March 5 at our secret bar in NYC

Tanisha is the COO of Gotham, and the former CEO of Brewdog USA, one of the greatest Punk brands of our time. The party is FREE for members of Punks & Pinstripes and $24 for everyone else, Only 30 tickets left. Get yours here.