John C. Havens (he/him)

We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing). In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

The Living Planet Index is the biodiversity metric that always claims the headlines. Unfortunately, many of these headlines are wrong. The index is very easy to misinterpret. The Living Planet Index reports an average decline of 73% across tens of thousands of wildlife populations since 1970. This does not tell us anything about the number of individuals, species or populations lost, or even the share of populations that are shrinking. Before reporting on the Living Planet Index we should understand what it actually tells us about the world’s wildlife. We should also be aware of the misconceptions and pitfalls of using this index to capture the changes in more than 34,000 of the world’s animal populations.