Women throughout history have always sought out relationship advice, whether from newspaper columnists like “Dear Abby,” letters to Cosmo, or just chatting with girlfriends. In the social media era, you can instead post anonymously on Reddit relationship forums or look to social media creators who discuss the topic.

Now, two sisters are launching a startup for young women, Hot Girl Hotline, which focuses on bringing AI into these conversation.

I know what you may be thinking: With all the advances in AI technology, founders are building something for women to talk about their dating woes? Well…yes!

The reality is that people have already been turning to large language models (LLMs) via apps like ChatGPT for this type of advice, and the team believes this type of activity should be handled more carefully.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, chatting with a general-purpose chatbot about personal topics can sometimes lead to disastrous effects — especially for those who were already mentally fragile. ChatGPT, for example, has faced a wave of lawsuits over its alleged manipulative conversation tactics that plaintiffs say contributed to negative mental health effects, and, in some cases, suicide.

The idea behind Hot Girl Hotline is to reach young women who are looking to have these sorts of private conversations while navigating dating life and relationships, but in a safer way.

“We’re not trying to be an AI companion,” explained Balia Mudgil, formerly a social media consultant, who co-founded the startup with her sister Sumrin (“Sumi”), who studied computer science at Stanford. “A companion is really going after solving loneliness, escapism, boredom — and you can rely on a lot of emotional dependency from that AI companion.”

Balia says the startup’s approach is to focus on offering quality advice grounded in behavioral science, but in a way that makes it feel like you’re chatting with a trusted friend or big sister. The conversation is often Socratic, with the AI asking you questions to help you arrive at the answer yourself.

“This is not to replace speaking to a human. This is not clinical advice, and we have a lot of safeguards in place…we take safety really seriously,” Baila said. If conversations raise flags, for instance, the user is referred to resources such as the crisis hotline 988.

“We believe the key to quality advice is not just knowing what to do next; it’s understanding why you’re doing it. So that’s a big piece of it,” added Sumi.

Notably, the AI also knows when to end the conversation; it doesn’t keep asking follow-up questions to drag you further down a rabbit hole. Instead, it pushes users to go take action out in the real world rather than ruminate on the problem.

The sisters believe there’s room for an app like this because not everyone wants to post on the web for advice, and there are times when you don’t want to bring up a personal, dating, or relationship-focused issue with a friend.

Friends can bring their own biases into the conversation, or the user may not want to put their partner on blast for something they did before they determine whether they’re going to work through it or end the relationship.

“It doesn’t mean you’re replacing your friend — you’re just trying to get another perspective,” says Balia of the hotline.

The app also personalizes its advice for each user to reflect their values, goals, identity, and tastes.

Under the hood, the startup relies on a mix of AI models and encrypts users’ data in transit and at rest. It doesn’t sell or train on the data, either. When it uses a third-party AI model, it follows a zero-data-retention policy there as well.

Hot Girl Hotline plans to monetize through a $9.99 per month subscription, which hundreds of its most active users are already paying for. Later, it may incorporate ads, too.

Relationship advice is just the beginning of how the company wants to cater to young women. It also plans to expand into other areas, like beauty and lifestyle.

New York-based Hot Girl Hotline is currently bootstrapped and will be participating in TechCrunch Disrupt’s upcoming Startup Battlefield 200. It’s available on iOS and the web.

What happens when AI moves from helping job candidates to evaluating them? HackerRank, a platform used by companies to assess and hire developers, is offering a glimpse at what that future of job interviews could look like with Chakra, an AI agent that conducts interviews, observes candidates as they work, and evaluates not just their answers but how they got there.

After around six months in beta, HackerRank is making Chakra generally available to its customers on Monday. The startup says the AI interviewer has already conducted more than 500,000 interviews during testing, with companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini among those that tried it, while HackerRank also tested the product internally.

AI has been a staple in job interviews for some time, with companies using voice agents and other automated tools to screen candidates and make the hiring process more efficient. Job seekers, meanwhile, have increasingly gained their own AI tools to help them navigate interviews, sometimes without employers knowing.

With Chakra, HackerRank is betting AI can change not only how interviews are conducted, but also what employers can measure. Beyond whether someone arrives at the right answer, the startup wants to assess harder-to-capture signals such as critical thinking and judgment, as well as what it calls “AI fluency” — how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution.

“The previous modality of evaluation was evaluating the output,” HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said in an interview. “Now, because of AI, anybody can produce an artifact.” The question for employers, he said, becomes whether they can understand the thinking and judgment that went into producing it.

In practice, a Chakra interview is designed to look more like doing the job than taking a traditional coding test. A candidate gets a task involving a real-world code repository, and they work through it in a canvas that includes an AI assistant. As the candidate works, Chakra can use the context of what they are doing to ask follow-up questions, such as why they chose one approach over another, or how their solution would change if a new constraint were introduced.

Ravisankar told TechCrunch that Chakra is changing the basic structure of the hiring process itself. What previously involved three separate rounds, comprising a recruiter screen, take-home assessment, and follow-up interview with an engineer, is now combined into a single Chakra interview, he said.

Giving candidates access to AI during an interview might seem to make it easier to cheat. However, HackerRank says it found the opposite. Suspicious-activity flags, Ravisankar said, were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional HackerRank assessments, though the rate varied depending on factors such as geography and seniority.

Ravisankar told TechCrunch that giving candidates access to AI reduces the incentive to secretly use outside tools that can feed them answers during an interview.

Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012, HackerRank built its business around coding challenges, eventually helping companies assess and hire developers based on their technical skills. The Y Combinator-backed startup now has more than 3,000 business customers, including Amazon, Nvidia, Clay, and Replit, and a community of over 30 million developers worldwide.

Chakra represents a bet against the kind of technical assessment business HackerRank spent years building. Its traditional product largely tested whether developers could solve coding problems correctly. Nonetheless, Ravisankar believes AI has made HackerRank’s earlier model less useful to measure engineering ability.

Ravisankar compared the transition internally to Apple moving from the iPod to the iPhone, as the old product still has value, but the new one represents where the startup believes the market is headed. “Chakra is going to be the headline,” he said. “It’s going to be the way that we’re going to move forward.”

However, giving AI a deeper role in evaluating candidates raises a different set of questions, particularly around how much of a hiring decision companies should delegate to an algorithm. Ravisankar told TechCrunch that Chakra is designed to score candidates rather than make the final hiring decision, which remains with humans.

AI, Ravisankar said, can handle more structured parts of an interview by consistently applying criteria set by an employer, while human interviewers can spend more time determining whether they actually want to work with a candidate and answering questions about the company, team, and role.

“AI is way less biased than humans, if you tune it properly,” Ravisankar said, arguing that an AI system can be instructed to follow the same rubric for every candidate rather than being influenced by factors such as a candidate’s background or education.

Applying the same criteria consistently, however, does not necessarily make an AI system free of bias. Automated hiring tools can inherit or amplify biases from the data, models, and criteria used to build them, prompting regulators to scrutinize their use in employment decisions.

The use of AI in hiring is already drawing regulatory scrutiny. New York City, for instance, requires employers using certain automated employment decision tools to subject them to an independent bias audit and provide notice to candidates before using them. Ravisankar acknowledged that hiring is a regulated area and said complying with such requirements is part of what HackerRank has had to build for.