• ChatGPT almost had a different name.
• OpenAI changed the chatbot's name in a "late-night decision," ChatGPT head Nick Turley said.
• The 2022 launch made ChatGPT a viral hit and helped push OpenAI's valuation higher.

"Chat with GPT-3.5" doesn't really roll off the tongue, but it's almost what OpenAI named ChatGPT.

On the latest episode of the OpenAI podcast, two leaders involved with the chatbot's development, research chief Mark Chen and head of ChatGPT Nick Turley, spoke about the days leading up to the launch that made the tool go viral.

"It was going to be Chat with GPT-3.5, and we had a late-night decision to simplify" the name, Turley said on the podcast published July 1. The team made the name change the day before the version's late 2022 launch, he said.

"We realized that that would be hard to pronounce and came up with a great name instead," Turley said.

They settled on ChatGPT, short for "generative pre-trained transformer."

Since then, ChatGPT has gained millions of users who turn to the chatbot for everything from routine web searches to guidance on how to give a friend career advice. Rivals, including Meta AI, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek, have also sprung up.

Before ChatGPT's launch, few within OpenAI expected the name to be so consequential, said Andrew Mayne, the podcast host and OpenAI's former science communicator.

He said the chatbot's capabilities were largely similar to those of previous versions. The main differences included a more user-friendly interface and, of course, the name.

"It's the same thing, but we just put the interface in here and made it so you didn't have to prompt as much," Mayne said on the podcast.

After OpenAI launched ChatGPT, though, the chatbot took off, with Reddit users as far away as Japan experimenting with it, Turley said. It soon became clear that ChatGPT's popularity wasn't going to fade quickly and that the tool was "going to change the world," he said.

"We've had so many launches, so many previews over time, and this one really was something else," Chen said on the podcast.

ChatGPT's success represented another kind of milestone for Chen: "My parents just stopped asking me to go work for Google," he said.

• I bought a 40-foot Morgan ketch for $1. I'm at least the third person to buy it for this amount.
• Some say there's nothing more expensive than a free boat, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
• My husband and I recently sailed for over four months and traveled over 1,000 miles on this boat.

"Simon! Lara!" shouted Bill the bartender as we entered the town brewery. "You know anyone who wants a free 40-foot boat?"

Simon, my husband, began frantically shaking his head no. The adage in the boating community is that there's nothing as expensive as a free boat, but I asked Bill to tell me more.

Bill was friends with a couple who had aged out of sailing and needed to get rid of their 1970 40-foot Morgan ketch, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

I bought a boat for $1

The boat wasn't actually free — when I spoke to the sellers, they wanted $1 for it. Turns out, I'm not the first person to buy this boat for a dollar. In fact, I'm at least the third.

One former owner sailed it almost from the North Carolina coast to Bermuda before experiencing issues that caused it to partially sink.

The owner before us bought it with severe damage and restored it. He kept the dollar tradition because the boat was too old to insure and needed too much cosmetic work to list it with a broker.

The dated interiors and worn surfaces were just right for us, though. The boat even had the tiny cast-iron wood stove I'd been coveting.

We love the adventures we've had

We set to scrubbing off a few years of dust and grime. We repainted the interior in sunny golds and oranges, leaning into the 1970s vibe.

After changing the oil and replacing some filters, she was ready to sail. All in all, we didn't have to spend too much fixing her up — our biggest cost was a few cans of paint.

We cast off the lines three months after purchase, setting sail from our home port in Oriental, North Carolina — a lovely small town of about 800 people, known as the sailing capital of the state.

One of our first stops was Georgetown, South Carolina, where we ate perlau fritters. A few weeks later, we were enjoying lionfish sushi in the Keys.

Our wood stove kept us warm through a freak winter snowstorm. We spent entire days watching nurse sharks and parrotfish by the seawalls in Marathon, Florida.

Because we could anchor for free or just a few dollars in most places, we had all the time to ourselves and didn't need to toil away at jobs for financing.

We sailed over 1,000 miles from North Carolina to the Florida Keys. In all, we spent over four months traveling, spending little to do it.

We made friends in anchorages whom we would never have met otherwise. Buying this boat has truly been a game changer for us.

I got into boating because housing was too expensive

When Simon and I got married, we started looking for a house in Dunedin, Florida. However, the few houses we found in our price range were less than appealing.

One home tour left us scratching flea bites after; another had a plant room built into the garage that had grown very moldy.

With a mortgage preapproval expiring, we were getting discouraged. One day, Simon showed me his laptop screen and said: "Alternate plan?"

It was a Craigslist ad for a 25-foot sailboat. That was the beginning.

10 extra feet doesn't sound like a lot, but it changes everything

We bought the 25-foot sailboat for $3,000. Since then, I've purchased several boats, each one a bit bigger and less expensive than the last.

Before buying the $1 boat, Simon and I were living on a 30-foot boat I'd purchased for $1,000. Anyone who's done the tiny home thing can tell you about the cluttered surfaces and the utter lack of time alone.

When you live on a boat that small, you don't get to sail it very much, either. Items on counters need to be stowed, and maintenance goes undone because you don't have the room to work.

The 10 extra feet that came with the 40-foot Morgan ketch were a welcome relief. We now have room to stow all our gear, so we spend time sailing instead of sitting at the dock. There's also less tension between us because we have enough space to do our own thing.

Our 1,000-mile shakedown cruise showed us this $1 boat is sturdy enough for any seas and comfortably equipped enough for us to live here without climbing the walls. Next winter, we'll take her to the Caribbean. After that? Only the wind knows.

• China's first passenger jet, the Comac C909, celebrated nine years since its maiden flight.
• Air China launched its first international service with the type on Tuesday.
• It's another sign of Comac's growing ambitions to cut into the Airbus-Boeing duopoly.

China's first homegrown passenger jet is picking up steam as the planemaker Comac builds a foothold to compete with aviation's big players.

The Comac C909 is designed for regional journeys, with a capacity between 78 and 90 seats.

That makes it smaller than any jet currently produced by Airbus or Boeing, instead likelier to compete with those built by the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.

It attracts less attention than the larger C919 — a similar model to the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 — but is still a key part of Comac's ambitions.

As Saturday marked nine years since the C909's maiden flight, China's official state news agency Xinhua interviewed the jet's chief designer, Chen Yong.

He called it "a pioneer in my country's commercial aircraft field," adding that it achieved "a breakthrough" by being China's first commercial aircraft.

Tuesday then saw flag carrier Air China launch its first international service with the C909. A water-cannon salute greeted the plane as it landed in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar after a 90-minute journey from Hohhot, in China's north.

"We look forward to it continuing to write the pride of domestic aircraft in the future," the airline said in a post on Weibo.

That came after Lao Airlines, the flag carrier of Laos, leased two C909s from Comac and started operations in April, Xinhua reported. Later that month, Vietnam's VietJet also leased two of the jets from Chengdu Airlines, launching daily flights between Ho Chi Minh City and the nearby Con Dao archipelago.

These are promising developments for the small jet, which Comac renamed from the ARJ21 last November, unifying its brand in a sign of growing ambitions.

However, only 166 such planes have been delivered, Chen said.

The plane also looks very similar to the McDonnell Douglas MD-80. One of Comac's predecessor companies partnered with the American planemaker in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, Comac has faced allegations of corporate espionage over the C919.

In 2022, a Chinese intelligence officer, Yanjun Xu, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a US jury found him guilty of trying to steal technology related to GE Aviation's engines.

The aviation industry remains divided on Comac's chances of competing with the likes of Boeing and Airbus.

"Comac is years away from being certified outside China … It's going to be a very limited market for quite some time," John Schmidt, Accenture's aerospace and defense lead, told Business Insider in an interview at last month's Paris Air Show.

Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said in February that the sector could go "from a duopoly to a potential triopoly."

He added that Comac was more likely to succeed thanks to its "privileged access" to the Chinese market, which accounts for a fifth of global aircraft demand.

• President Donald Trump announced a trade deal with Vietnam that leaves tariffs on the major exporter at 20%.
• The US imports about 10 times more goods in value from Vietnam than it exports each month.
• Apparel brands like Nike could soon hike prices due to a large number of suppliers in Vietnam.

From Lululemon leggings to Nike sneakers, your favorite apparel may soon get pricier.

With less than a week left for the US to strike deals before additional higher tariffs imposed on April 2 come back, Wednesday morning started with President Donald Trump announcing a deal with Vietnam, saying that details of the deal would follow.

Apparel stocks like Lululemon, Nike, and Columbia Sportswear immediately spiked following his announcement.

The shares, however, tumbled within the next hour when Trump announced that not only would a 20% tariff apply to Vietnam, which is higher than the 10% baseline tariff currently on all imports, the tariff would be 40% if the companies reroute products from a different country through Vietnam, known as "transshipping."

Nike and Columbia Sportswear eventually recovered their gains, and Lululemon broke even at the end of the day.

In exchange, Trump said that Vietnam has agreed to zero tariffs on all US exports to the Asian country. According to data from the US Census Bureau, the US imports more than 10 times of goods in value from Vietnam each month compared to what Vietnam absorbs from the US.

Popular apparel makers remain vulnerable to a 20% tariff on Vietnam.

According to Lululemon's latest active supplier list from April, 38 out of 144 of their suppliers are located in Vietnam. Based on Nike's sustainability interactive map, the company works with more than 130 factories in Vietnam, which make up around 25% of all its factories. In comparison, only 5% of Nike factories are in the US.

Similarly, according to Columbia Sportswear's "corporate transparency map" more than 230 out of the 1017 suppliers the company works with are located in Vietnam.

Since April 9, when Trump announced a 90-day pause on some of the highest tariffs imposed on 75 trading partners, there have been talks of negotiations with Japan, Thailand, and the EU. But the talks have thus far only yielded one completed deal with the UK aside from the new agreement with Vietnam.

Over the past week, Trump had said on Fox News Channel's "Sunday Morning Futures" that he would be sending out tariff letters on July 9 when the tariff pause expires, signaling that there may not be an extension of the same scale.

"Congratulations, we're allowing you to shop in the United States of America, you're going to pay a 25% tariff, or a 35% or a 50% or 10%," Trump said of what would happen.

"We'll look at how a country treats us — are they good, are they not so good — some countries we don't care, we'll just send a high number out," Trump added.

• Banking could be "redefined" by as much as 40% by 2030, a new report predicts.
• The report says AI will fundamentally reshape many aspects of what banks do.
• It was prepared by ThoughtLinks, led by veteran banking exec Sumeet Chabria.

A new report attempts to put hard numbers on a question hanging over every Wall Street corner office: just how much of banking work will AI actually change?

Artificial intelligence is on track to redefine 44% of the work done at banks by 2030, according to ThoughtLinks, an independent consulting firm.

ThoughtLinks — which is led by founder and CEO Sumeet Chabria, a former tech and operations COO at Bank of America and a Wall Street veteran — mapped nearly 5,000 individual banking "processes" to see which roles or units at banks will experience the most upheaval in their roles.

ThoughtLinks found that tech, engineering, and infrastructure—collectively considered one sector — would be most susceptible to transformation, with a projection of 55% of the work involved in that sector being redefined by 2030. It's a logical outcome, considering how many of the tasks in these fields are precisely the kinds that automation is best suited to handle.

Front office, client-facing sectors are hardly immune. Commercial banking could be redefined by as much as 49% by 2030, wealth management to the tune of 42%, and investment banking by as much as 33%, according to the report.

Wall Street banks are investing heavily to compete. JPMorgan has deployed a large language model suite to its 200,000 employees, while Goldman Sachs has rolled out its own ChatGPT-like sidekick, GS AI Assistant. Citigroup also last week announced a new leadership team to drive AI strategy for its nearly quarter-million workers worldwide.

It's important to note that these numbers do not reflect ThoughtLinks' predictions about how many jobs could be lost or created as a result of AI — rather, they look at how much of the work done by those who work in banks could be done differently thanks to the implementation of artificial intelligence.

To assess how much each banking process could be redefined, ThoughtLinks developed a framework that maps what bank employees do to nearly 5,000 individual "processes." "'Redefined' reflects substantial AI-enabled, process-level change via automation, resequencing, elimination, or redesign," the firm wrote in its report.

In an interview, Chabria said that breaking finance jobs down to their most basic components would be critical to understanding how to retrain workers in the face of the AI revolution. "Clearly, you've got to keep the level of agility," he said, "because things are going to change."

Chabria shared three examples with Business Insider of how he anticipates sectors to respond to AI-driven changes. We got a look at snapshots for commercial banking, investment banking, and wealth management. Take a look at what's already transforming, what will be adapted by 2030, and the parts of the job that may stay mostly in the hands of humans for now.

Commercial banking: 49% redefined by 2030

What's already being automated:

• First-generation banking advisor copilot services are now live, helping bankers obtain insights on clients, quickly summarize notes or files, draft basic memos, or flag policy exceptions.
• Some manual workflows — like creating spreadsheets, drafting emails, and navigating legacy systems — are being replaced. This reduces time doing manual work, as well as human error.
• Customers have access to virtual AI-enabled assistants on corporate banking systems that give them personalized insights and enable them to do routine transactions more quickly.

What is expected to be redefined by 2030:

• Client onboarding: GenAI will help guide client onboarding conversations and tailor explanations, while the next iteration of AI will likely be able to verify forms and assess risks.
• Banks will leverage AI to assess small business creditworthiness to expand credit access.
• Banks will use AI to adjust loan pricing, fee structures, and product terms based on clients' behavior, financial patterns, and market conditions.
• AI tools will help detect some breaches and generate internal alerts in real time, increasing security 24/7.

What is likely to resist being redefined by AI:

• Large corporate lending will still require human credit judgment and board oversight.
• Banks will need to rely on legal, tax, risk, and structuring teams.

Investment Banking: 33% redefined by 2030

What's already being automated:

• Drafting documents like prospectuses or pitchbooks is being digitized. Generative AI tools can now pull in some market data, past deals, financial comps, and company-branded slides to build draft pitchbooks in minutes.
• Internal AI copilots are accelerating deal prep. Bankers can now use GPT-based tools to instantly summarize earnings calls, analyst reports, and client financials.
• Generative AI tools can now review documents, flag missing disclosures, and summarize new regulatory changes.

What is expected to be redefined by 2030:

• Banks will leverage AI to simulate investor demand or model pricing scenarios for equity and debt offerings. (Final allocation will remain human-led.)
• AI will help bankers test thousands of ways to structure a deal by adjusting debt, equity, pricing, and covenants to find the right balance for clients.

What is likely to resist being redefined by AI:

• Final IPO and syndicate pricing will remain human-led. Setting the price for a new issuance will require banker judgment, market feel, and live investor feedback.
• Winning mandates and advising the C-suite will remain relationship-driven and led by humans, who will use AI to enhance their knowledge or judgment and land new mandates.

Wealth Management: 42% redefined by 2030

What's already being automated:

• AI copilots can now answer questions, generate meeting prep docs, and summarize client portfolios — in seconds.
• Financial planning is faster and becoming more scalable. Tools powered by generative AI can aid advisors in building personalized plans that simulate life events, goals, and risk tolerance without starting from scratch.
• Client reporting is now becoming personalized with custom commentary on investment performance, market moves, and risk tailored to each client's portfolio.

What is expected to be redefined by 2030:

• Tax management will become more automated and timely.
• AI will help tailor advice and investment strategies to reflect individual preferences, financial behavior, and goals.
• On the flip side, clients may use AI to manage their wealth in their own portfolio with smart triggers.

What is likely to resist being redefined by AI:

• Client engagement and coaching will remain human. During market downturns or personal events, clients still want empathy, reassurance, and value judgment that only a trusted advisor can provide.

• Regulators will ensure that advisors remain responsible for advice, not AI.

  Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or SMS/Signal at 561-247-5758. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
  

Mark Zuckerberg — in an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar talent raid — has dramatically reset the market for blue-chip AI builders, and further complicated the government's ability to stack its own technology bench.

Why it matters: The Meta CEO is trying to lure talent from OpenAI and other tech companies with offers that can top $100 million in total compensation for the first year alone — beyond most star athletes' pay.

Top-tier pay packages being offered by Meta for AI researchers can reach up to $300 million over four years, WIRED reports.

• A tech-news feed on X used a baseball card motif to portray an OpenAI researcher being "TRADED" to Meta.

The talent derby has sent compensation soaring across AI, as rivals scramble to keep top talent and entice others not to flirt with Meta and other suitors.

• It's partly a continuation of an ongoing recruiting war — OpenAI built its lab with the help of some massive comp packages.
• Zuckerberg unveiled his dream team this week as Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), after meeting personally with potential recruits at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.

The big picture: America has witnessed staggering valuations for startups. But never before have we seen company-valuation-sized salaries for people, rather than ideas or enterprises.

• That's injecting a new layer of drama and next-level economics for the biggest companies — many the size of nation-states — racing to win the AI wars.

Collateral damage: The U.S. government is already struggling to recruit top researchers and scientists. A remotely talented AI specialist can now assume that riches in the tens of millions are attainable. So why sacrifice to serve in government?

• China, by contrast, can command top talent to work on government projects. A front-page Wall Street Journal story on Wednesday, "China Is Quickly Eroding America's Lead in the Global AI Race," said AI models from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Alibaba, are becoming popular in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Zoom in: Zuckerberg's biggest single bet was investing $14 billion in Scale AI, and bringing co-founder Alex Wang to Meta as chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will lead Meta's work on AI products and applied research.

• Eleven other new AI star hires were listed in Zuckerberg's internal memo announcing Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Altman hit back at Zuckerberg's spree this week, telling OpenAI researchers in a Slack message that Meta "has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list," WIRED reports.

• "I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries," Altman added. "Missionaries will beat mercenaries."

Between the lines: Tech investors tell us that until very recently, the revenue outlook for AI models was unclear, and there was a debate about the return on capital spending. Now it's apparent that leading AI companies will do hundreds of billions in revenue per year.

• OpenAI is enjoying rampaging growth: The company said last month that it has $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, just 2½ years after the launch of ChatGPT — up from $5.5 billion last year. OpenAI has projected for investors that, fueled by AI agents and other new products, sales could total as much as $125 billion in 2029 and $174 billion in 2030, according to documents seen by The Information.
• Anthropic — a rival AI company led by Dario Amodei, an OpenAI alumnus — has hit a pace of $4 billion in revenue annually, up almost four times from January, The Information reported this week.
• At those rates of growth, you can see what Zuckerberg is seeing — and why he's suddenly pouring massive spending into making sure Meta remains a dominant AI player.

The backstory: Zuckerberg is repeating a winning playbook. By 2012, he realized Facebook was behind on the mobile web. He famously redirected the entire company toward catching up.

• Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and later WhatsApp for $16 billion — racing ahead in areas where others had innovated. But this time he's betting on individuals, rather than successful enterprises.

Reality check: Meta has spent a fortune on Llama, its large-language model (LLM), in an effort to develop a frontier model that can compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. In a splashy story about "The List" of AI geniuses Zuckerberg is courting, the Wall Street Journal said Meta's "laggard history in generative AI has made some recruits hesitant."

• Bubbles can burst. AI salaries and data-center costs won't be sustainable without the ultimate payoff being unimaginably huge. And the more these companies spend, the bigger that payoff needs to be. As uncovered by a survey Axios reported last month, many small businesses using AI aren't even paying for it.

The other side: Altman, noting that OpenAI has built "a culture that is good at repeatable innovation," said last month on a podcast hosted by Jack Altman, his younger brother, that Meta was making "giant offers to a lot of people on our team — like $100 million signing bonuses" and more than that in annual compensation.

• "We're set up such that if we succeed ... then everybody will do great financially," Sam Altman said. "[I]t's incentive-aligned with mission-first, and then economic rewards and everything else flowing from that."

The bottom line: The bidding war is the most public manifestation of the secret race among AI giants — all betting that the technology will bring trillions of dollars in productivity gains. For them, the timeline is the biggest question.

• Axios' Scott Rosenberg, Ben Berkowitz and Zachary Basu contributed reporting.

Go deeper ... "Behind the Curtain: An AI Marshall Plan."

The demise of a controversial proposal in Republicans' budget bill that blocked state-level regulation of artificial intelligence is fueling fresh pressure for federal action, advocates told Axios Wednesday.

Why it matters: Congress' reluctance to set national AI rules for privacy, safety and intellectual property rights has left states to forge ahead with their own rules.

Driving the news: Some senators fought until the last minute to keep an industry-backed 10-year ban on state-level regulation in the budget bill.

• Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and some of his allies in the administration fought until the last minute to keep an industry-backed 10-year ban on state-level regulation in the budget bill. They failed — for now.
• "We hope that this unequivocal rebuke to the idea of saying that states can't regulate AI is a lot of political motivation for the folks who do want to regulate AI on Capitol Hill," said Eric Kashdan, Campaign Legal Center's senior legal counsel for federal advocacy.

Catch up quick: The Senate early Tuesday voted nearly unanimously to remove the proposed moratorium on state-level AI regulations from the budget bill.

• It would have prevented states that want certain government grants from enforcing legislation on AI regulation.
• "The reconciliation package was the best possibility for something this bad to get through," said Alix Fraser, the vice president of advocacy for Issue One.
• The House passed a version of the budget bill that included the state AI moratorium, but the Senate's version, which dropped it, now faces resistance from some House Republicans.

Friction point: President Trump's aides and advisers were split on the moratorium.

• While many have favored a light hand with AI to bolster U.S. efforts to keep ahead of China, others are concerned that the moratorium rules would also make it harder for states to regulate social media, particularly around protecting kids.
• Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon helped fuel opposition, the Wall Street Journal reported, and many in the MAGA movement still believe Big Tech has stifled conservative voices.
• "Bannon has never been a fan of this sort of techno utopia that a lot of Silicon Valley-ites desire, and the idea of a moratorium was antithetical to that approach," Fraser said.

Zoom out: More than 20 Democratic- and Republican-led states have passed AI regulation legislation.

• An April Pew study found the public is worried the government won't go far enough in regulating AI.
• Most Americans support a national AI standard and think a patchwork of state laws will make it harder for the U.S. to compete with China, according to a June Morning Consult and TechNet poll.
• "There's a huge public demand for AI to be regulated, a bipartisan demand for AI to be regulated," Kashdan said. "And not only will they give up on trying to start states from stepping up but they'll recognize that this means they really need to get their act together and pass federal AI regulations."

Yes, but: Congress has always had a hard time passing laws regulating tech, and the mood in Washington right now is favoring innovation over regulation

• Efforts to regulate AI at the federal level are unlikely to go as far as consumer protection measures in the states.

What's next: The battle over a moratorium is not over, said Chris MacKenzie, vice president of communications for Americans for Responsible Innovation.

• Advocates expect standalone legislation to try to preempt state AI laws.

Go deeper: GOP revolt delays House vote on Trump's "big, beautiful bill"

• "28 Years Later" introduces a cult leader inspired by Jimmy Savile, a BBC star outed as a prolific abuser.
• Chi Lewis-Parry, who played an infected Alpha in the film, called the character "masterful."
• "It's hard to come up with something original," he told BI.

Fans of "28 Years Later" were divided by the ending that introduces Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), a cult leader who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Savile, the BBC presenter outed as a prolific sexual abuser after his death in 2011.

In an interview with Business Insider in June, the film's respective director and producer, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, confirmed that the character is based on Savile.

Chi Lewis-Parry, who plays Samson, a new, super-strong type of the infected called an Alpha, told BI that he thinks introducing Crystal was a bold decision but said "you have to test the boundaries."

Boyle has always challenged audiences with his films, including "28 Days Later" and "Trainspotting," a dark comedy about people in Glasgow addicted to heroin. In the world of "28 Years Later," the Rage Virus would have broken out before Savile's crimes could be unearthed. It seems likely the sequel, "The Bone Temple," will explore this further.

Lewis-Parry said: "It's hard to come up with something original" in the horror genre.

"Introducing that character is a different type of horror. It's taking real horror and sticking it in a fantasy horror scenario. I think that's masterful because you're not just relying on the jump scares and the stereotypical gore.

"You are kind of teasing the psyche of an audience with a real-life horror that has been discovered," he added. "For me, it's almost scarier because that really happened. Whatever you attach to that character is the fear element. I think it's brilliant, personally."

Boyle and Garland told BI how Crystal's scenes in "28 Years Later" set up the sequel. Garland said the bizarre cult leader taps into bigger themes of a "misremembered past" and "how selective memory is."

O'Connell will no doubt have a larger presence in the second film as Crystal, while Lewis-Parry will reprise his role as Samson.

BI previously reported how Lewis-Parry said he scared Boyle into casting him in the role during his audition.

Lewis-Parry teased that fans "might fall in love with Samson," but didn't reveal any plot points, adding: "it's magical when you watch something and know nothing about any surprises."

• Military officials and experts warn that air superiority may not be possible in modern warfare.
• Israel, however, was able to quickly achieve it against Iran.
• Iran, though capable, isn't bringing the same fight that a foe like Russia or China could.

Israel swiftly seized air superiority over parts of Iran during the latest fight, showing that it's still possible in modern, higher-end warfare to heavily dominate an enemy's skies.

But there's a risk in taking the wrong lesson from that win. Iran isn't Russia or China, and as the West readies for potential near-peer conflict, it really can't afford to forget that, officials and experts have cautioned.

Western military officials and warfare experts have repeatedly warned in recent years that achieving air superiority against those countries would be a daunting task.

Russia and China, especially the latter, boast sophisticated, integrated air defense networks with ground-based interceptors well supported by capable air forces, electronic warfare, and reliable space-based and airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Air superiority in a limited theater is not the same as breaking through a complex anti-access, area-denial setup.

Israel's victory in the air war over Iran shows that air superiority is "not impossible" in modern warfare, former Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, a warfare strategist, explained. That said, he continued, a Western conflict with Russia or China would be "very different."

A victory in the air for Israel

Israel attacked nuclear and military sites in Iran in bombing runs and eliminated dozens of Iranian air defense batteries.

Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said it "highlights what you can do with a modern air force against some, on paper, fairly impressive defenses."

Iran maintained a capable layered air defense network featuring domestic systems, foreign-supplied defenses, and some modernized older systems. Though only semi-integrated compared to fully networked air defenses, it presented an obstacle.

Israel dismantled Iranian defenses over multiple engagements through extensive planning, detailed intelligence, and the employment of combat-proven airpower, specifically fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighters built for penetration and suppression of enemy air defenses and fourth-generation F-15s and F-16s, which can also support that mission.

Important to Israel's success in the latest fight with Iran were the engagements last year that substantially weakened Iranian air defense capabilities, as well as Israel's skills in this mission. Failures and aircraft losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War led it to reevaluate how it approached enemy air defenses, in many ways leading to the emergence of the kind of missions used against Iran.

Ed Arnold, a security expert at RUSI, said that Israel reporting no aircraft losses "was significant, and it just showed that, yeah, you can get air supremacy very quickly." The caveat there is that doing so requires the right tactics, weapons, and intelligence, but even then, it is not guaranteed.

Retired Air Commodore Andrew Curtis, an airfare expert with a 35-year career in the Royal Air Force, told BI "the situation that everybody's been used to over the last 30 years is air supremacy," but when it comes to high-intensity war against a near-peer adverary, realistically, "those days are long gone."

Russia and China

Iran had air defenses, but not airpower. It's air force is largely made up of obsolete Western, Soviet, and Chinese aircraft. The ground-based surface-to-air missile batteries are more capable, but that's only one part of the defensive picture.

Curtis explained that Iran has "very little in the way of air defense aircraft, whereas of course Russia, and especially China, has stacks of them." Both Russia and China field fourth-generation-plus aircraft, as well as fifth-generation fighters.

China, in particular, has multiple fifth-gen fighters in various stages of development, and there are indications it's working on sixth-generation prototypes. By comparison, Iran's air force looks a lot like a plane museum.

But they also boast more advanced and more effective air defenses. Bronk said Russia's defenses are "better networked, more capable, more numerous, and more densely layered than Iran's." He said that if the West rolled back the SAM threat, it would likely be able to overcome Russia's air force, but China is a different story.

China has a complex integrated air defense network supported by ground-based air defenses, naval air defenses, and what Bronk characterized as "an increasingly very capable modern air force," among other capabilities. And China also has a "far greater and more sophisticated missile arsenal for striking bases" to hamstring an enemy's airpower. Additionally, it holds a strong economic position with an industrial base that is turning out high-end weapons.

China has also been tremendously increasing its number of interceptors without really expending any, unlike the US, which has been burning through interceptors in Middle Eastern conflicts.

Not all of China has the same protections, but breaking through defenses would likely represent a substantial challenge in a conflict, especially in something like a Taiwan contingency.

A conflict between the West and China could look like "a more traditional air war" — something not seen in a long time, Curtis said, explaining that air-to-air combat could make a comeback, with pilots again shooting down enemy planes. "In a peer-on-peer conflict, certainly with China, you would see a lot of that, because China has got a lot of air assets."

Future air battles

Achieving air superiority, as Israel did recently and as the US did in the Gulf War in the 1990s and in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, has been crucial to the Western way of war, often serving as a tool to enable ground maneuvers.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which failed to knock out Ukraine's air defenses, now far more robust than at the start of the war, has shown what a conflict looks like when it isn't achieved. Aircraft are shot out of the sky, and ground forces are locked in grinding slogs. Devastating long-range attacks are still possible, but quick victory is generally not.

It has resulted in some stark warnings for future warfare.

Speaking on air superiority, Gen. James Hecker, the commander of NATO's air command, warned last year that "it's not a given." He added that "if we can't get air superiority, we're going to be doing the fight that's going on in Russia and Ukraine right now."

Other military leaders have said that air superiority may only be achieved in short bursts. War is full of surprises, but evidence indicates that's a real possibility. Achieving

Curtis said air planners now have to focus on specific priorities, like protecting air bases, and figuring out how to achieve a "localized time-bound air superiority or air supremacy in support of a short-term mission or operation."

"It's a different mindset," he said.

The key in future wars will be to seize control of as much of the aerial battlespace as possible to do what's necessary in the moment, all while holding firm defensively, as Israel did against Iran's retaliatory ballistic missile strikes, experts said. That means maintaining a strong air force and strong air defenses.

"Nothing in Ukraine or Israel has shown that air superiority isn't needed in the future," Ryan shared. "I think they've both shown that having air superiority is an extraordinarily important part of warfare and remains so.

• Motherhood is challenging, especially when you have six kids.
• As my kids have grown, life hasn't gotten any easier. It's just different.
• I try to remind myself that parenting is supposed to be hard.

Some mornings, I wake up and feel like I'm already behind. Someone can't find their shoes, someone is fighting over who gets to sit in the front seat, and I'm pouring cereal into a cup because all the bowls are somehow in the dishwasher — again. And in the middle of the chaos, I catch myself thinking, "How am I still so bad at this?"

I've been a mom for nearly 20 years. I have six kids, ranging in age from a teenager down to a 1-year-old. I've homeschooled. I've worked. I've done it all with and without a support system. If experience came with a trophy, I'd probably have a shelf full of them. And yet, I still have days when I go to bed wondering if I was patient enough, present enough, or just enough.

Life doesn't get easier, it gets different

I'm in what I call the messy middle of motherhood. During this time kids aren't babies anymore, so people assume it must be easier. But it's not. It's just different.

The sleepless nights are traded for emotional exhaustion. You're no longer chasing toddlers — you're navigating curfews, attitudes, identity, and the constant tug-of-war between boundaries and independence.

Your kids you, but in ways that are harder to define. They need guidance, empathy, and snacks every 15 minutes. They need deep conversations late at night, even when you feel like you have nothing left. They need your strength when you're running on fumes.

And the whole time, you're expected to hold it all together with grace, with gratitude, and preferably without falling apart in the middle of the grocery store.

This is supposed to be hard

But here's something I'm learning: Motherhood is only hard for the ones who are trying. If you didn't care so much, it would be easy.

You wouldn't overthink your decisions or question whether your child needs therapy or just a nap. You wouldn't stay up worrying, praying, googling symptoms, or wondering if you're doing any of it right.

That weight you're carrying? That doubt? That relentless voice in your head wondering if you're failing? It exists because you care.

And that matters more than we give ourselves credit for.

Because the truth is, there's no such thing as a perfect mom. There's just a present one. A mom who shows up. A mom who keeps trying. A mom who loves deeply, messes up often, and starts over again each morning.

I know I'm not alone

If you're feeling stretched thin, emotionally worn down, or like you're somehow still not doing enough — you're not alone. Even moms with big families and years of experience can feel like they're drowning in the demands of the everyday.

But here's the good news: you're not failing. You're in the thick of it. You're living out the most important (and often overlooked) part of motherhood, the in-between years. The not-so-cute, not-so-Instagramable, fiercely formative middle.

And one day, when the house is quieter and the shoes are where they're supposed to be, you'll look back and see that all your invisible work mattered. That even when it felt like too much, you were enough.

So if today was loud and messy and imperfect — same here. We're not failing. We're mothering. And that's more than enough.

• Southern cities dominate RentCafe's top 10 list for renters in the US.
• RentCafe analyzed housing affordability, local economies, and quality of life.
• The South claims 41 of the top 50 cities, highlighting cost of living advantages.

Go South, young man.

Well, if you're a renter, you might want to at least consider it.

According to a new analysis from research firm RentCafe, the 10 best cities in the US for renters are all in southern states, such as the Carolinas, Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Alabama.

To compile the list, RentCafe considered 20 metrics across three categories: housing affordability, the attractiveness of local economies, and quality of life.

From sources like the Census Bureau and Yardi Matrix, the firm looked at stats like local unemployment rates, average apartment square footage, income growth, how many apartments in the city are new, average commute times, and more.

"The South firmly establishes itself as the top region for renters in 2025, by claiming an impressive 41 of the 50 featured cities," wrote Adina Dragos in the report. "This growing interest is reflected in the region's consistently high rankings in key categories, like cost of living and housing and local economy, with nearly all leading cities securing spots within the top 30 for these criteria."

Below are the top 10 on RentCafe's list. Each city's national housing cost of living ranking, which had a 50% weighting in RentCafe's index, is included. The average apartment square footage and the share of new apartments in the city are also shown.

10. Orlando, Florida

City's national housing cost of living rank: 17

Average apartment size: 965 square feet

Share of new apartments: 19%

9. Raleigh, North Carolina

City's national housing cost of living rank: 14

Average apartment size: 947 square feet

Share of new apartments: 21.5%

8. Round Rock, Texas

City's national housing cost of living rank: 5

Average apartment size: 915 square feet

Share of new apartments: 23.8%

7. Charleston, South Carolina

City's national housing cost of living rank: 30

Average apartment size: 974 square feet

Share of new apartments: 27.4%

6. Wilmington, North Carolina

City's national housing cost of living rank: 10

Average apartment size: 952 square feet

Share of new apartments: 28.5%

5. Huntsville, Alabama

City's national housing cost of living rank: 5

Average apartment size: 945 square feet

Share of new apartments: 27.7%

4. Austin, Texas

City's national housing cost of living rank: 13

Average apartment size: 866 square feet

Share of new apartments: 26.1%

3. Atlanta, Georgia

City's national housing cost of living rank: 9

Average apartment size: 968 square feet

Share of new apartments: 21.1%

2. Sarasota, Florida

City's national housing cost of living rank: 3

Average apartment size: 969 square feet

Share of new apartments: 39%

1. McKinney, Texas

City's national housing cost of living rank: 4

Average apartment size: 948 square feet

Share of new apartments: 33.5%