Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The future of mental health just arrived in your pocket — with the first 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 genuine connections with their digital counselor, is AI about to become the therapist of choice 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 new AI-powered flirting experience

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI RESEARCH

🏥 AI provides ‘gold-standard’ therapy treatment

Image source: University of Dartmouth

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 details:

• 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 an average of 6 hours over the 8-week trial, equivalent 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 regularly engaging even without prompts.

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

TOGETHER WITH AUGMENT CODE

⚙️ A coding agent for pro developers

The Rundown: Augment Code just introduced Augment Agent, a powerful new mode that can help you complete software development tasks end-to-end.

Augment Agent can handle:

• Adding new features that span multiple files

• Queuing up tests in the terminal

• Opening Linear tickets and starting a pull request

• Creating a new branch in GitHub from recent commits

Sign up and start building with Augment Agent.

OPENAI

📈 OpenAI seeing ChatGPT subscriber boom

Image source: GPT 4o / Getty Images

The Rundown: OpenAI's ChatGPT has reportedly hit a new milestone with 20M paid subscribers, driving the company'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 details:

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

• The overall 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 growth coincides with a new $40B funding round at a $300B valuation, despite the company continuing to operate at a significant loss.

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

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

AI TRAINING

🔍 Visualize your knowledge with mind maps

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how you can use NotebookLM's powerful new mind map feature to transform 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 new notebook.

2. Upload diverse sources, including PDFs, Google Docs, websites, and YouTube videos, to build a rich knowledge foundation.

3. Engage with your content through the AI chat to help 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 about any specific concept.

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

PRESENTED BY FUEL iX

🔒 Escape AI vendor lock-in

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

With Fuel iX Copilots, you can:

• Access 30+ LLMs and switch seamlessly between AI providers

• Maintain security and compliance while staying agile

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

Learn more and discover how to unlock AI innovation without boundaries.

TINDER

❤️‍🔥 Tinder’s new AI-powered flirting experience

Image source: Tinder

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 details:

• The game 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 5 sessions daily to focus on real-world connections, designed to build confidence rather 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 focusing on the real-life benefits of practicing with AI — and while the tech’s influence in dating can seem dystopian, it’s certainly an innovative 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, action 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

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI rolled out its new 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 company after 8 years, leaving a vacancy at the head of its FAIR team.

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

CEO Sam Altman posted that OpenAI is dealing with GPU shortages, telling users to expect delays in product releases and slow service as they work to find more capacity.

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

MiniMax released Speech-02, a new text-to-speech model capable of 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 end of the workshop, you’ll walk away with practical skills and a clear understanding of how to use GPT-4o effectively in your own 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