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OpenAI ChatGPT-5 introduction displayed on smartphone screen
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OpenAI announces plan for flagging mental health crises and adding teen controls

A recent flurry of news reports highlights how teens and users facing mental health crises turn to ChatGPT for help, but the tool lacks features needed to alert others and dissuade self-harm.

Jon Keegan

Over the past few weeks, a number of alarming stories have surfaced describing ChatGPT users who turned to the AI chatbot for help during mental health crises, only to have the tool encourage their plans for self-harm.

  • In August, a Connecticut man killed his mother then himself after ChatGPT reportedly encouraged his paranoid delusions.

  • In April, A 16-year-old died of suicide after conversations with ChatGPT in which the chatbot provided specific information about how to kill himself.

  • In a New York Times op-ed, a mother shared the story of how her 29-year-old daughter had shared her suicidal thoughts with a ChatGPT “therapist” persona, yet it failed to alert anyone — something a real mental health professional would have done. ChatGPT helped the woman write her suicide note.

Today, ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced a 120-day plan to roll out new protections for identifying and helping users who may be facing a mental health crisis, including adding parental controls — even though they wouldn’t have helped in two of these cases.

The company plans to partner with councils of mental health and medical professionals to “shape a clear, evidence-based vision for how AI can support people’s well-being and help them thrive,” according to a blog post announcing the changes.

OpenAI said it also will route sensitive conversations to its “reasoning models,” which take longer to craft more accurate and helpful responses.

As kids head back to school, ChatGPT use is climbing as students widely adopt the tool for help with schoolwork. The planned parental control system will allow parents to link their teen’s account to theirs, control how ChatGPT responds, control features like chat history, and receive notifications when the system identifies “acute distress” in the teens’ conversations.

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Rani Molla

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan
3/13/26
Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Sign Opposes Data Center
tech
Rani Molla

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

tech
Rani Molla

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

tech
Jon Keegan

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

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