The Neuron: AI Explained

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as AI becomes more embedded in our daily lives, one of the biggest questions we face is whether these systems can responsibly support emotional and psychological well-being.

AI chatbots are increasingly being used for emotional support, but recent lawsuits faced by OpenAI and earlier ones targeting character.ai and Google's AI Overviews, as well as clinical reports, and internal research have raised valid concerns about their impact on vulnerable users.

What does it take to build an AI system specifically designed for mental health from the ground up? Is that even possible?

In this LIVE episode of The Neuron Podcast, Corey Noles and Grant Harvey speak with Daniel Reid Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Slingshot AI, about Ash, an AI application purpose-built for therapeutic support. Slingshot has raised $93M from a16z, Radical Ventures, and others to develop a foundation model for psychology trained on structured therapeutic conversations across modalities such as CBT, DBT, and psychodynamic therapy.

We discuss the limitations of general-purpose chatbots in mental health contexts, recent controversies surrounding AI and psychiatric risk, and what differentiates a system designed to provide structured therapeutic engagement compared to one being used in a way it was never intended to be. The conversation also explores a broader question: Can AI meaningfully expand access to high-quality mental health care, and where should clear boundaries remain? Or should we keep our counseling where we always have, on a couch with a box of Kleenex and a hug nearby?

🔗 Try Ash:
https://www.talktoash.com/

📌 About The Neuron Podcast
The Neuron breaks down the biggest stories in AI for 580,000+ daily readers. Our podcast goes deeper with the leaders, founders, and researchers shaping the future of AI. New episodes every week.

Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter — theneuron.ai

Genspark went from AI search startup to autonomous AI agent platform, hitting $250M ARR in 12 months with no paid ads until they bought a Super Bowl spot.

Co-founder and COO Wen Sang joins Corey and Grant to explain what "AI employee" actually means, demos Genspark Claw live (including buying us coffee mid-interview), and lays out his big thesis: legacy software is becoming infrastructure while AI agents become the new interface between humans and work.

We get hands-on with Workspace 4.0, Claw, and a custom agent built live for the show.

• Genspark Workspace 4.0 announcement: https://www.genspark.ai/blog/genspark-ai-workspace-4
• Genspark sb-git: https://genspark.ai/sb-git/intro
• OpenAI's customer story on Genspark: https://openai.com/index/genspark/
• Forbes AI 50 (2026): https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50/
• Marc Benioff on Salesforce Headless 360 (referenced by Wen): https://x.com/Benioff
• Andrej Karpathy's "wiki for agents" idea (referenced as inspiration for sb-git): https://x.com/karpathy
• Wen on the DealMaker Show: https://alejandrocremades.com/wen-sang/

Try Genspark for free: https://genspark.ai

Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.ai

New to AI and not sure where to start?

Join us live Thursday for The AI Starter Kit: What to Try...and What to Ignore.

This beginner-friendly session will help you cut through the noise and focus on the AI tools, habits, and prompts that actually matter. By the end, you’ll know what to try first, what not to worry about yet, and how to ask better questions when you get stuck.

In this session, we’ll cover:
🚀 The best first steps for AI beginners
🛠️ What tools and features are worth trying now
🙅 What you can safely ignore for the moment
💡 Simple ways to get better answers from AI
🔍 How to troubleshoot when AI gives you something unhelpful

Whether you’re brand new to AI or still figuring out how to use it well, this live session will give you a practical place to start.

Can AI move from predicting proteins to actually designing new drugs? Isomorphic Labs is trying to answer one of the biggest questions in science.

In this episode of The Neuron, Corey Noles and Grant Harvey talk with Rebecca Paul, Head of Medicinal Drug Design at Isomorphic Labs, and Michael Schaarschmidt, Foundational AI Research Lead.

They explain why drug discovery is so slow, expensive, and failure-prone—and why AI drug design is much more complicated than “generate a molecule and ship it.” The conversation covers AlphaFold, structure prediction, molecule generation, binding models, clinical failure rates, human trust in AI systems, and the long-term hope of designing drugs for targets once considered “undruggable.”

In this episode:
Why drug discovery can take more than a decade
What people misunderstand about “AI-designed drugs”
How medicinal chemists actually use AI models
Why biology is harder than text, images, or code
What it would take to make drug discovery faster and cheaper
The dream of designing a drug candidate in one iteration
Why “undruggable” proteins may not stay undruggable forever

Additional resources:
Technical report blog Best resource for learning about the capabilities that we are building
Isomorphic Labs websiteBest destination for learning more about Iso and joining our team in London, Lausanne or Cambridge, MA

Subscribe for more grounded conversations on how AI is changing science, work, and the world.

For more practical, grounded conversations on AI systems that actually work, subscribe to The Neuron newsletter at https://theneuron.ai.

Join us Thursday as we break down OpenAI’s new Workspace Agents and what they mean for the future of work.

We’ll cover:
⚙️ What workspace agents are
🤖 How they differ from regular chatbots
🏢 Where they fit into real team workflows
🚀 How to start working with them effectively
🔄 What agentic AI means for workplace automation
📈 Why teams are shifting from one-off prompts to repeatable AI-powered processes

Whether you’re experimenting with ChatGPT at work, leading AI adoption, or trying to understand where OpenAI is taking agents next, this session will help you see what’s possible and what to watch for.

Tune in for a practical, hands-on deep dive into the future of AI at work.

Sign up for The Neuron newsletter: https://www.theneuron.ai/