Episode Description
In this episode of Neural Compass, host Mark Jacobstein sits down with Dr. Nick Haber — director of the Autonomous Agents Lab at Stanford's Graduate School of Education — for a conversation that starts with a deeply uncomfortable paper and ends somewhere more hopeful than you'd expect.
The paper's title says it plainly: LLMs in their current form cannot safely replace mental health providers. What made it land beyond the usual academic audience was the specificity. Not a vague warning about AI safety — actual test prompts, actual responses, actual miss rates. Including one where a model responded to an implied crisis by helpfully listing the tallest bridges in the area.
New episodes every two weeks. This one is essential listening for anyone building in mental health AI — or anyone using it.
This episode covers:
- The two classes of LLM failure in mental health — and why only one of them is fixable at the model level
- Why LLMs miss suicidal ideation 20% of the time, human therapists miss it 7% of the time, and what combining them might achieve
- Why getting an AI to push back on a patient — skillfully, at the right moment — is harder than getting it not to cause harm
- The Autism Glass Project: using computer vision to help children with autism read social cues in real life, not in a mirror
- Why "not fully autonomous" is not a reason to wait — and what lane-assist has to do with therapy AI
About the Speakers
Nick Haber, Guest
directs the Autonomous Agents Lab at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. His lab published one of the more sobering papers on LLMs and mental health — specific, measured evidence for what most people already suspected — and has spent years building AI that promotes human connection rather than replacing it.
Before the LLM work, he led the Autism Glass Project: a decade-long effort to use computer vision and Google Glass to help children with autism recognize social cues in real life, in real time, with actual people. The technology worked. Scaling it didn't — yet.
His recommendation for staying current: watch the people around you adapt to these tools. The adaptation is ongoing and uneven.
Mark Jacobstein is the co-founder and president of Jimini Health. A longtime entrepreneur at the intersection of AI and health tech, he now leads Jimini’s mission to transform mental and behavioral health through clinically grounded, AI-powered care.
For healthcare executives, researchers, investors, and anyone who thinks the mental health crisis deserves serious answers — this is the show.