AI’s ‘gold-standard’ therapy skills

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The long run of mental health just arrived in your pocket — with the primary clinical trial of an AI therapy chatbot showing results comparable to gold-standard human care.

With depression symptoms slashed by over 50% and users forming real connections with their digital counselor, is AI about to develop into the therapist of selection for mental health care?

In today’s AI rundown:

• AI’s ‘gold-standard’ therapy treatment

• OpenAI seeing ChatGPT subscriber boom

• Visualize your knowledge with mind maps

• Tinder’s latest AI-powered flirting experience

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI RESEARCH

🏥 AI provides ‘gold-standard’ therapy treatment

The Rundown: Dartmouth researchers published results from the first-ever clinical trial of an AI therapy chatbot, providing care comparable to “gold-standard cognitive therapy” and showing improvements across depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.

The main points:

• Threrabot was trained on evidence-based therapeutic practices and had built-in safety protocols for crises, with oversight from mental health professionals.

• Users engaged with the smartphone-based chatbot for a median of 6 hours over the 8-week trial, corresponding to about 8 traditional therapy sessions.

• The AI achieved a 51% reduction in depression symptoms and 31% reduction in anxiety, with high reported levels of trust and therapeutic alliance.

• Users also reported forming meaningful bonds with Therabot, communicating comfortably, and frequently engaging even without prompts.

Why it matters: With each the stigma surrounding mental health care and the shortage of access to quality care across the globe, AI assistance could possibly be an absolute game-changer for getting people the support they need — in a way that may be even simpler and trusting than a human therapist.

TOGETHER WITH AUGMENT CODE

⚙️ A coding agent for professional developers

The Rundown: Augment Code just introduced Augment Agent, a robust latest mode that may make it easier to complete software development tasks end-to-end.

Augment Agent can handle:

• Adding latest features that span multiple files

• Queuing up tests within the terminal

• Opening Linear tickets and starting a pull request

• Making a latest branch in GitHub from recent commits

Enroll and begin constructing with Augment Agent.

OPENAI

📈 OpenAI seeing ChatGPT subscriber boom

The Rundown: OpenAI’s ChatGPT has reportedly hit a brand new milestone with 20M paid subscribers, driving the corporate’s revenue to an estimated $5B annual run rate — coming on the heels of a $40B round and the virality of GPT 4o’s image generation.

The main points:

• Monthly revenue has surged 30% in three months to roughly $415M, with premium subscriptions, including the $200/mo Pro plan, boosting income.

• The general user base has grown even faster, reaching 500M weekly users — with Sam Altman saying the recent 4o update led to 1M sign-ups in an hour.

• The expansion coincides with a brand new $40B funding round at a $300B valuation, despite the corporate continuing to operate at a major loss.

• OpenAI also revealed it can be launching its first open-weights model since GPT-2, addressing a significant critique of its lack of open-source releases.

Why it matters: Despite concerns about an AI bubble, OpenAI’s growth continues to trend in a single direction… Up. ChatGPT has develop into synonymous with the AI boom, and with viral moments like 4o, the AI race has develop into more than a battle for the highest model — with distribution, user base, and experience all playing just as big of a job.

AI TRAINING

🔍 Visualize your knowledge with mind maps

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll find out how you need to use NotebookLM’s powerful latest mind map feature to rework your documents into interactive visual knowledge networks — making it easier to explore connections and learn complex topics.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to NotebookLM and create a brand new notebook.

2. Upload diverse sources, including PDFs, Google Docs, web sites, and YouTube videos, to construct a wealthy knowledge foundation.

3. Engage along with your content through the AI chat to assist the AI understand your interests and priorities.

4. Generate interactive mind maps by clicking the mind map icon, then click on any node to ask questions on any specific concept.

Pro tip: You can even click between different nodes in your mind map to find unexpected connections between concepts and open focused discussions concerning the relationships between ideas.

PRESENTED BY FUEL iX

🔒 Escape AI vendor lock-in

The Rundown: TELUS solved a significant AI challenge with Fuel iX Copilots — a vendor, cloud, and application agnostic AI solution that provides enterprises full flexibility.

With Fuel iX Copilots, you possibly can:

• Access 30+ LLMs and switch seamlessly between AI providers

• Maintain security and compliance while staying agile

• Construct no-code, customizable AI copilots with advanced features

Learn more and discover the way to unlock AI innovation without boundaries.

TINDER

❤️‍🔥 Tinder’s latest AI-powered flirting experience

The Rundown: Dating giant Tinder just released “The Game Game,” an OpenAI-powered speech-to-speech experience that helps users practice and test their flirting skills with virtual personas.

The main points:

• The sport uses OpenAI’s Realtime API, GPT-4o, and GPT-4o mini to create realistic personas and scenarios, with users speaking responses to earn points.

• AI personas react in real-time to users’ conversation skills, offering immediate feedback on charm, engagement, and social awareness.

• The system limits users to five sessions each day to give attention to real-world connections, designed to construct confidence somewhat than replace human interaction.

Why it matters: As we’ve seen with Character AI and its over 20M monthly users, people really like talking to AI chatbots. But unlike other options, Tinder is specializing in the real-life advantages of practicing with AI — and while the tech’s influence in dating can seem dystopian, it’s actually an revolutionary use of real-time speech-to-speech models.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🟣 Fellow – Create smart meeting workflows with an AI that joins GMeet, Zoom, and Teams calls to capture notes, motion items, and insights*

• 🖥️ Nova Act – Amazon’s agentic AI browser system for completing tasks

• 🎥 Runway Gen-4 – AI video model with enhanced consistency and control

• 🎬 Camera Motion Concepts – Luma Labs’ feature for camera movements

*Sponsored Listing

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧭 Palantir Technologies – Deployment Strategist

• 🗺️ Waymo – Senior Product Manager

• 📡 xAI – Network Development Engineer

• 🛠️ UiPath – Product Support Engineer

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

OpenAI rolled out its latest 4o image generation capabilities to its free tier of users, bringing the viral tool to its entire user base.

Meta’s VP of AI Research, Joelle Pineau, announced she is departing the corporate after 8 years, leaving a emptiness at the pinnacle of its FAIR team.

Alibaba is reportedly planning to release Qwen 3, the corporate’s upcoming flagship model, this month — coming after launching three other models within the last week alone.

CEO Sam Altman posted that OpenAI is coping with GPU shortages, telling users to expect delays in product releases and slow service as they work to seek out more capability.

Meta researchers introduced MoCha, an AI model that produces realistic talking character animations from speech and text inputs.

MiniMax released Speech-02, a brand new text-to-speech model able to ultra-realistic outputs in over 30 languages.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop on Friday at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of the workshop, you’ll walk away with practical skills and a transparent understanding of the way to use GPT-4o effectively in your individual work — beyond the hype.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team