Breakups and burnouts: Can a bot be your new therapist?
Sneha Bhura
TNN
Updated: Jul 8, 2025, 23:23 IST IST
Whether it's breakups or breakdowns, many Indians are turning to generative AI to discuss their mental health challenges
When 21-year-old engineering student Garvit Singh found out his roommate had been hospitalised with liver issues, he turned to ChatGPT for comfort. Singh, who has been using the free version of the Gen AI chatbot as an emotional sounding board for nearly two years, prefers it over human therapists. 'With people, you feel judged. It takes time and money to 'click' with a human therapist,' he says. ChatGPT, by contrast, offers sympathy, if not solutions, minus the judgement. 'It's become a habit now. Like writing a diary or journal every day,' he adds.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
41 minutes ago
- Time of India
Google hires Windsurf CEO and researchers to advance AI ambitions
Alphabet's Google has hired several key staff members from AI code generation startup Windsurf , a Google spokesperson said on Friday, in a surprise move following an attempt by its rival OpenAI to acquire the startup. Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and select members of the coding tool's research and development team will join Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence division, the Google spokesperson said. The former Windsurf team will focus on agentic coding initiatives at Google DeepMind, primarily working on the Gemini project . ChatGPT maker OpenAI was in talks to buy Windsurf, one of the hottest startups disrupting software development, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters in June. OpenAI could not immediately be reached for a comment. "We're excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding," the Google spokesperson said. As part of the deal, the search engine giant is entering a non-exclusive license for certain Windsurf technology, according to a source familiar with the matter. Google will not take a stake in Windsurf, the person said. Windsurf investors will receive liquidity as part of the deal, sources told Reuters. Google's surprise swoop mirrors a deal in August 2024 to hire key employees from chatbot startup Big Tech peers, including Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, have similarly taken to these so-called acquihire deals, which some have criticized as an attempt to evade regulatory scrutiny. Microsoft struck a $650 million deal with Inflection AI in March 2024, to use the AI startup's models and hire its staff, while Amazon hired AI firm Adept's co-founders and some of its team last June. Meta took a 49% stake in Scale AI in June in the biggest test yet of this increasing form of business partnerships. Unlike acquisitions that would give the buyer a controlling stake, these deals do not require a review by U.S. antitrust regulators. However, they could probe the deal if they believe it was structured to avoid those requirements or harm competition. Many of the deals have since become the subject of regulatory probes. The development comes as tech giants, including Alphabet and Meta, aggressively chase high-profile acquisitions and offer multi-million-dollar pay packages to attract top talent in the race to lead the next wave of AI. Windsurf's head of business, Jeff Wang, has been appointed its interim CEO, and Graham Moreno, vice president of global sales, will be president, effective immediately. The majority of Windsurf's roughly 250 employees will remain with the company, which has announced plans to prioritize innovation for its enterprise clients.
Hindustan Times
an hour ago
- Hindustan Times
Delhi developer in remote role told to travel to Bengaluru meetings at own expense, post goes viral
A Reddit post by a techie from Delhi has gone viral after he shared his experience about a job. The developer, who has four years of experience, was offered a remote SDE1 frontend role by a startup based in Bengaluru. However, during the final HR round, the company shared some unexpected conditions. A full stack developer's post on Reddit went viral online.(Representational image generated using ChatGPT) The post was shared by @lordarthur77, in which he mentioned that although the role is remote, the company said he would need to visit Bengaluru every quarter for 7 to 10 days. These meetings would be at his own expense, with no travel or accommodation reimbursement. "Is this a common practice: Company asking for quarterly meetups in Bangalore on your own expenses? It's a remote setup though," the caption of the post reads. He further mentions that the company is following BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). 'I have to buy my own laptop, and also asking to install security patches to protect the data as well.' Check out the viral post here: The post was shared on July 10, 2025, since then, it has garnered more than 200 likes and several comments. Here' s how people reacted to this post: Many Reddit users expressed surprise and concern over the company's conditions. Some felt it was unreasonable to expect a remote worker to travel to another city without any reimbursement. Others pointed out that BYOD policies are common, but companies should offer support or compensation. One of the user, @BigDocument2946, commented, 'Scam definitely avoid it. Once you install that software there is no privacy , it's exploitation.' A second user, @Longjumping-Green351, commented, 'Mine is remote too but quarterly visit is expected in the office and no reimbursement for it.' Another user, @Vegetable-Mall-4213, commented, 'At least partial reimbursement should be there.' Several users shared similar experiences and advised the developer to clarify all terms in writing before accepting the job offer.
Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
Karen Hao's Empire of AI brings nuance and much-needed scepticism to the study of AI
Most conversations that we have around Artificial Intelligence (AI) today share one commonality: the technology's society-altering capacity, its ability to leap us towards the next breakthrough, a better world, a future that we rarely imagined would be possible. The founding mission of Open AI, the company that made AI a household name through ChatGPT in 2022, is 'to ensure that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are generally smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity'. Behind this seemingly optimistic idea, tech reporter Karen Hao argues, is the stench of empires of old — a civilising mission that promises modernity and progress while accumulating power and money through the exploitation of labour and resources. Hao has spent seven years covering AI — at the MIT Tech Review, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She was the first to profile OpenAI and extensively document the AI supply chain — taking the conversation beyond the promise of Silicon Valley's innovation through reportage around people behind the black boxes that are AI models. And it is these stories that find centre-stage in 'Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI', her debut book. It is a company book and, like all good business books, gives an intimate picture of the rise of an idea, the people, strategy and money behind it. But the book stands out as it provides us one way of framing the dizzying AI boom and conversation around us. In doing so, the book joins the list of non-fiction on AI that brings nuance and much-needed scepticism of the subject while being acutely aware of its potential. In 2024, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor from the Computer Science department of Princeton University wrote 'AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference'. The book lays out the basics of AI research, helping distinguish hype from reality. The same year, tech journalist Parmy Olson wrote Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World about the unprecedented monopoly that Open AI and Google's AI research wing Deepmind currently have in the world. This approach needs a lot of computing capacity. The physical manifestation of it are the massive data centres that are mushrooming everywhere. These data centres, in turn, consume a lot of energy. Open AI cracked this technique and doubled down on it: more data, more high-functioning and expensive Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) that make the computation happen, and more data centers to house them. This more-is-more approach, Hao writes, has 'choked' alternative forms to AI research, which has been a subject many have been trying to crack and expand since the 1950s. 'There was research before that explored minimising data for training models while achieving similar gains. Then Large Language Models and ChatGPT entered the picture. Research suddenly stopped. Two things happened: money flowed into transformers (a type of highly-effective neural network) and generative AI, diverting funding from other explorations,' Hao says. With the 'enormous externalities' of environmental costs, data privacy issues and labour exploitation of AI today, it is important to 'redirect some funds to explore new scientific frontiers that offer the same benefits of advanced AI without extraordinary costs,' Hao argues. But it might be harder than said. In her book, Hao traces how researchers, who were working outside major AI companies, are now financially affiliated with them. Funding, too, primarily, comes from tech companies or academic labs associated with them. 'There's a misconception among the public and policymakers that AI research remains guided by a pure scientific drive,' Hao says, adding that 'the foundations of AI knowledge have been overtaken by profit motives.'
