What's on Your Mind?

In recent weeks, OpenAI has faced seven lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT contributed to suicides or mental health breakdowns. In a recent conversation at the Innovation@Brown Showcase, Brown University’s Ellie Pavlick, director of a new institute dedicated to exploring AI and mental health, and Soraya Darabi of VC firm TMV, an early investor in mental health AI startups, discussed the controversial relationship between AI and mental health. Pavlick and Darabi weigh the pros and cons of applying AI to emotional well-being, from chatbot therapy to AI friends and romantic partners. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former ed…

Company culture doesn’t affect performance. That’s not a hot take, that’s what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report: The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe t…

Resilience is a much-needed skill in today’s tough job market. Despite the headlines lambasting young employees as “lazy” and “entitled”, a Big Four consulting firm is taking matters into its own hands and offering training for recent grads. PwC will give its new young hires “resilience” training to toughen them up for careers as management consultants. The firm has introduced the initiative in the UK to help Gen Z brush up on their “human skills,” including communication with clients and handling day-to-day work dynamics, like pressure or criticism. “Quite often we are struck that the graduates that join us… don’t always have the resilience; they don’t always h…

For many, picking up a controller at the end of a long day to neutralize some zombies or take on a side quest with a fairy is a way to unwind and escape from the demands of work. But it might also have some unexpected benefits that follow you from the character select screen and into the office. A new report from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) finds that the motivations behind gaming go far beyond fun. While 66% of the more than 24,000 players in 21 countries surveyed say they play primarily for enjoyment, the majority credit gaming with developing real-world skills, like problem-solving, teamwork, adaptability, and critical thinking. All useful tr…

How seriously are you taking your 2026 rebrand? Do you have your 365 buttons ready? If this means nothing to you, you likely spent the holiday period at the lord intended – offline. But if spending less time on your phone isn’t one of your 2026 resolutions, let me catch you up. It started with a TikTok posted in December, all about rebranding for 2026. In the comments people shared their own strategies and self-improvement tips for the upcoming year. One comment, however, stood out from the rest. “I’m getting 365 buttons, one for each day because I want to do more stuff and I’m scared of time so I want to be more conscious of it,” a user called Tamara wrote.…

David Temkin was driving south from San Francisco, down Highway 101, as billboard after billboard pitched AI in variations of dense word salad. One ad marketed “automated testing compliance done without command shift.” Another promised “safer schools with instant visitors screening.” All of them marketed tech companies, but to whom and for what was obscure—even for tech insiders like Temkin. “It is absolutely absurd,” Temkin tells Fast Company. “Some of these are absolutely impenetrable. Like, what are they even talking about? It makes me wonder what the intention is.” The Silicon Valley veteran has lived through plenty of change, watching firsthand as the tech wo…

In summer 2019, Bob McDonough took a full stack web development coding bootcamp at the University of Pennsylvania. An English-turned-telecommunications major in college, McDonough had been working at a bar while sending out job applications for positions he barely wanted. Most paid below $50,000 a year, an undesirable salary for a 27-year-old in Philadelphia. McDonough says his “degree really wasn’t doing it” for him. “So, I figured I’d add a certificate to stack my résumé,” he says. What McDonough was doing was upskilling—the practice of learning new skills or sharpening old ones to attain maximum desirability in the job market. While taking this web dev course,…

Culture rot is when everything that once made a company good gradually starts to disappear—resulting in sinking morale, low productivity, lots of gossip, quiet quitting, and overall cynicism. And it can cause big problems for everyone. View the full article

Efforts to hollow out the federal workforce by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have resulted in a dramatic rise in layoff announcements. The latest monthly data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows that employers in the United States announced more than 172,000 layoffs during February, which was an increase of 245% from January and the highest monthly total since mid-2020, during the pandemic. Further, it was the highest number of layoffs for the month of February since 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, when more than 186,000 layoffs were announced. So far, through the first two mo…

It’s official: DOGE, the The President administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” has met an early end. Even before The President took office, DOGE was conceived of as an outside advisory board that would recommend government reforms and find $500 billion in annual spending to cut. The day after The President was inaugurated, the department was officially founded, with Elon Musk—CEO of Tesla and the world’s richest man—at its helm. Within the first 100 days of The President’s second term, DOGE played a central role in cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs, nixing funds to foreign food aid and medical research, overhauling longtime government cy…

Technology Transformation Services (TTS), a high-tech consulting group housed within the General Services Administration (GSA), is tasked with helping agencies modernize their internal systems and public-facing websites. In the past, the group has had the resources and personnel to create innovative new solutions: for example, building Login.gov, a single sign-on system for secure access to government services, along with Cloud.gov, the government’s cloud hosting environment. But now, with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the helm, the group faces a rapidly shrinking headcount and mandate, says a source within the GSA. Two DOGE opera…

AI has now arrived at the Treasury Department. Sam Corcos, a former startup leader and Department of Government Efficiency affiliate now serving as chief information officer at the Treasury Department, appears to have approved spending at least $1.5 million on up to 3,000 licenses for ChatGPT, the OpenAI platform, federal spending records show. The agency has obligations to spend $1.5 million on the services, and has already outlaid more than $500,000 for the technology, those records show. Fast Company obtained a user agreement showing that Treasury is allowing employees to use ChatGPT for “authorized” mission purposes. Such purposes include using the technolog…