• North Korean troops have returned to fighting alongside Russia, South Korea's spy agency said.
• It also said there appears to have been a deployment of fresh troops.
• Ukraine said in January that at least 3,800 North Koreans had been killed or wounded in the war.

North Korean troops have returned to fighting alongside Russia, South Korea's spy agency said, following reports of earlier heavy losses.

"Following about a monthlong lull, North Korean troops were placed back in the frontline region of Kursk starting in the first week of February," South Korea's National Intelligence Service said in a note to the press seen by South Korean news agency Yonhap.

"It appears that there has been a deployment of additional troops, but their size is still being examined," the intelligence agency said.

The note came after South Korean newspaper The JoongAng cited unnamed sources as saying that Russian cargo ships and military aircraft had transported between 1,000 and 3,000 additional North Korean troops sometime in January or February.

Business Insider was unable to independently verify the claim.

Last fall, Western and South Korean intelligence agencies said that Pyongyang had sent around 11,000-12,000 troops to fight in Kursk, the Russian region under partial occupation by Ukraine.

Russia was estimated to be paying around $2,000 a month per soldier, though the soldiers themselves are unlikely to see much of that.

Dmytro Ponomarenko, Ukraine's ambassador to South Korea, told Voice of America in November that Pyongyang would likely maintain a presence of up to 15,000 troops in the war, rotating soldiers every two to three months.

He said this could mean 100,000 North Korean troops cycling in and out of combat within a year.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last month that at least 3,800 North Koreans had been killed or wounded in Kursk.

The UK's Ministry of Defence also said earlier this month that North Korean units had been withdrawn from frontline positions, likely to rest and refit before being redeployed.

"This is almost certainly primarily due to heavy losses sustained during attacks against Ukrainian-held positions," it said.

Pyongyang has sent some of its best units to Russia — special forces including members of its elite 11th Corps, also known as the "Storm Corps," considered to be committed and hardened fighters.

But the US said in December that North Korean troops were being sent on "hopeless" human wave assaults against Ukrainian positions, taking more than 1,000 casualties in the space of just one week.

According to the Kyiv Independent, Russia has, in recent days, ramped up its attacks in Kursk. The region is considered a key negotiating chip in any coming peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff questioned whether Big Tech's AI investments are delivering results.
• Salesforce is focusing on AI integration, not building costly data centers, Benioff said Wednesday.
• The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $9.99 billion, missing consensus estimates.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has berated Big Tech peers for their spending on AI and data centers, questioning whether companies like Microsoft are seeing real returns on their massive investments.

Benioff said Wednesday that Salesforce isn't investing in projects that would suck up the company's cash but wouldn't guarantee big returns.

"We aren't building huge $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, $100 billion data centers," Benioff said during Salesforce's earnings call. "We're not doing some of these kind of engineering efforts that may or may not have some kind of huge payoff, but is going to take down all of our cash and all of our margin for the next several years."

Instead, Benioff said the company is "augmenting" its existing product line with AI and taking advantage of "incredible" infrastructure investments by others to deliver on what he has called the "digital labor revolution."

Benioff's comments come as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have ramped up their planned AI investments for this year.

Amazon is leading the way, planning to allocate over $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, up from $77 billion in 2024. The vast majority will be spent on expanding Amazon Web Services and scaling AI infrastructure, the company said earlier this month.

Microsoft, which Benioff singled out by name on the earnings call, plans to spend $80 billion on AI-related infrastructure this year.

The Salesforce CEO isn't convinced by Microsoft's AI-powered workplace tools, describing the company as the "reseller of OpenAI" and questioning the company's agentic AI offering.

"Where on their side are they delivering agents? Where in their company have they done this? Where are they at best practice?" Benioff said, adding, "Do they have humans and agents working together to create customer success? Are they re-balancing their workforce with humans and agents?"

It's not the first time that Benioff has publicly taken shots at Microsoft.

Last year, he openly mocked Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, on multiple occasions, calling it "disappointing" and comparing it to Clippy, Microsoft's discontinued animated paperclip assistant.

Meanwhile, Benioff is pushing Salesforce's own rival agentic AI offering.

"Our goal is to be the number one provider of digital labor in the world," he said during the earnings call. "That's it. I don't think there really is another goal."

Salesforce reported fourth-quarter revenue of $9.99 billion, missing a consensus estimate of $10.04 billion.

Its shares fell by 5% in extended trading after the company forecasted fiscal 2026 revenue below Wall Street expectations.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.

• AI advances could widen wealth gaps, which has prompted calls for a universal basic income.
• UBI offers recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of status.
• AI leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman have called for a universal basic income.

Universal basic income, once a utopian ideal, has become a hot topic among AI leaders.

It's a recurring cash payment made to all adults in a certain population, regardless of their wealth and employment status. There are no restrictions on how recipients spend their money.

As advancements in artificial intelligence technology drive economic growth, concerns are rising about whether the wealth it generates is shared equitably.

Industry leaders such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AI's "godfather," Geoffrey Hinton, have warned about AI's potential to eliminate jobs — and subsequently widen the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots. They, along with other tech leaders, are advocates of universal basic income as an antidote.

The concept of countries implementing universal basic income has shifted in recent years from a niche topic within tech circles to a mainstream conversation, thanks in part to the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who made UBI a central part of his platform in 2020.

Yang campaigned on what he called the "Freedom Dividend," monthly $1,000 payments with no strings attached to all American adults. The idea was met with skepticism, and Yang's candidacy quickly fizzled. After the success of pandemic-era stimulus checks, though, and now the rise of AI, the idea has gained new traction.

Guaranteed basic income, which is similar to UBI but targets specific groups of people for a set period of time, has been piloted over 100 times across the country. The United States has basic income programs in 16 states, along with Washington, DC, that give residents cash — no strings attached.

The movement toward basic income programs is not without its critics. Some argue the programs could disincentivize recipients to work or even encourage them to spend frivolously. Some say the expenses of basic income programs could lead to higher taxes or local government budget cuts.

For now, though, AI leaders say it's the best option to mitigate the adverse economic impacts the technology could have. Here's what some of the major AI figures are saying about UBI.

Sam Altman

Altman has long been a vocal proponent of universal basic income.

In July, the results of Altman's universal basic income study were published. The study, which began in 2019, was conducted by the nonprofit research lab OpenResearch, and OpenAI contributed $60 million to it — $14 million of which was Altman's own money.

The study distributed payments to 3,000 urban, suburban, and rural residents of Texas and Illinois, all of whom had annual incomes below $28,000. One-third received $1,000 a month for three years, while the rest received $50 a month.

The study found that those who received the $1,000 payments increased their overall spending by an average of $310 a month, but most of that spending went toward food, rent, and transportation.

"We do see significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, but those effects fade out by the second and third years of the program," the report said, adding: "Cash alone cannot address challenges such as chronic health conditions, lack of childcare, or the high cost of housing."

But that's not Altman's only UBI endeavor. He also has a futuristic cryptocurrency startup called Worldcoin, which aims to build the largest encrypted identity network in the world by scanning people's irises with a baseball-sized orb. One way this technology could be implemented, its founders say, is to underpin the network that lets it collect UBI.

As OpenAI continues to build more capable foundation models, Altman has also suggested that rationing their computational resources across individuals might be more economically efficient than distributing cash. Altman has floated the idea of a "universal basic compute" in which people would get a "slice" of the computational resources of the company's large language models that they could use however they liked.

Elon Musk

Musk is a champion of UBI. The world's richest man has said that universal basic income could give people more freedom over how they use their time and money and that AI would increase the share of UBI that people could receive.

In May 2024 at the annual technology conference VivaTech, Musk said: "In a benign scenario, probably none of us will have a job. There would be universal high income. There would be no shortage of goods and services. The question will really be one of meaning: If a computer can do, and the robots can do, everything better than you, does your life have meaning? I do think there's perhaps still a role for humans in that we may give AI meaning."

Vinod Khosla

Khosla says AI advancements will cause job losses by automating, the majority of human labor and that UBI will be a necessary safety net.

"As AI reduces the need for human labor, UBI could become crucial, with governments playing a key role in regulating AI's impact and ensuring equitable wealth distribution," Khosla wrote in a post on the website for Khosla Ventures, his firm, in September 2024.

Unlike the internet or mobile phones, which have assisted human workers, he wrote that AI "amplifies and multiplies the human brain much as the advent of steam engines and motors amplified muscle power." In other words, he suggests humans will be too slow and expensive to contribute meaningfully to the labor force in the age of AI.

Dario Amodei

Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said UBI is the least that can be done to mitigate the effects of AI.

"Civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism. I suspect that some new and stranger thing will be needed, and that it's something no one today has done a good job of envisioning. It could be as simple as a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will only be a small part of a solution," he wrote in an essay on his personal blog in October 2024.

In Amodei's opinion, AI will alter our world in such a fundamental way that we'll need to think about a more comprehensive solution to inequality.

Andrew Yang

Even before AI took the world by storm, Yang, an entrepreneur and lobbyist, was a proponent of universal basic income. He advocated giving all Americans a $2,000 monthly stipend for the duration of the pandemic.

In Yang's interview with Business Insider in June 2020, a few months after he dropped his presidential campaign, Yang said he was "very confident that universal basic income was the future of our country."

Geoffrey Hinton

Hinton, the "godfather" of AI, has expressed concerns about the ramifications of AI.

Hinton has discussed his fears about AI-induced job losses and advised the UK government to adopt universal basic income as a solution.

• Valar Atomics, led by Isaiah Taylor, is trying to revolutionize nuclear energy.
• Valar's model uses "gigasites" with thousands of advanced reactors to produce nuclear energy.
• Valar says it does not build reactors like they are "artisanal cheese."

At 16, Isaiah Taylor dropped out of high school. He had ambitions beyond cramming for the SATs and competing with his classmates to get into a top college.

Instead, Taylor managed to land a six-figure job as a coder. He had taught himself coding years before and had built a body of work through freelance jobs and side projects. Eventually, one of his contacts recommended him for a gig building classified technology for the Defense Department.

Yet Taylor, whose great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, was always interested in nuclear power.

Now 25, his biggest venture yet, Valar Atomics, emerged from stealth earlier last week. The company is backed by a team of 35 nuclear experts and $21 million in funding. Taylor says it aims to make nuclear energy more affordable — like SpaceX did for space travel.

The motto: cheaper, faster, better

Valar aims to revamp the way nuclear reactors are deployed and, in turn, solve the problem of scaling them. Typical nuclear power plants can take five years or more to construct. In Valar's view, that's akin to building reactors like "artisanal cheese."

To solve that problem, the company plans to develop what it calls "gigasites," creating and installing thousands of small, modular, high-temperature gas reactors over time.

Small modular reactors, or SMRs, generally have a maximum output of 300 megawatts compared to large nuclear reactors, which can generate over 1,000 megawatts. Collectively, though, the SMRs at a gigasite could produce thousands of times the energy of a typical nuclear power plant, according to Valar.

"It allows you to produce very cheap energy because all of the complexity is already dealt with on the first couple of reactors," Taylor said.

Instead of distributing power through the grid — the network that delivers electricity from power plants to homes and businesses —Valar plans to directly supply power to customers that need a lot of it, like data centers, green steel plants, and hydrogen production facilities, by building the sites right next to them.

" The grid is actually not a very good customer for nuclear energy," Taylor said. It "needs your reactors to essentially be spread out."

The rise of the small modular reactor

SMRs have gained momentum as a cheaper, greener, and faster alternative to traditional nuclear reactors. In recent years, a number of SMR companies have emerged with plans to bring their first reactors online in the coming years.

Oklo, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is developing small reactors that run on nuclear waste. Oklo aims to deploy its first one in 2027. X-Energy — in which Amazon invested $500 million — aims to bring over 5 gigawatts of power online through SMRs by 2039. Kairos Power also signed an agreement with Google to provide energy from its SMRs, with plans to bring its first reactor online by 2030.

However, critics of SMRs argue that they should not be seen as a silver bullet for the problems that plague traditional reactors.

A 2024 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that SMRs are still "too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky" to meaningfully transition us from fossil fuels in the coming 10 to 15 years.

Researchers have raised concerns about the radioactive waste produced by these reactors. A 2022 study from Stanford and the University of British Columbia found that SMRs generated more radioactive waste by "factors of 2 to 30" than large-scale reactors.

Valar argues that its gigasite model tackles the challenges of cost and speed by enabling it to deploy reactors to achieve economies of scale rapidly. With regard to safety, the company points to its use of tri-structural isotropic particle fuel, a heat-resistant nuclear fuel made from a combination of uranium, carbon, and oxygen. TRISO, as this fuel is more commonly known, generates more nuclear waste, but Valar claims it is "good at encapsulating the nuclear waste," making it highly resistant to spreading, minimizing environmental impact, and preventing misuse by bad actors.

TRISO is also being tested by Kairos Power and X-Energy, which is building a dedicated fuel fabrication facility.

Fuel and ambition

Despite being a young startup, Valar also has big plans to fuel the world with synthetic fuels that are cheaper than oil.

The company said it has pioneered a process for developing alternative hydrocarbon fuels that can replace the traditional fuel used in aviation, vehicles, and military operations.

It all begins with the company's reactors, which — once up and running — will generate heat at temperatures exceeding 900 degrees Celsius, or over 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit.

Valar aims to use this heat to power a thermochemical process that splits water into its component atoms: hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will then be combined with captured carbon dioxide through a collection of chemical reactions to create carbon-neutral synthetic fuels because no new carbon is extracted from the ground.

" You can sell the hydrogen itself, right, which is a big market, but you can also create, synthetic fuel," Taylor said. " We can make jet fuel, diesel, gasoline. We can make all of our hydrocarbons that the world relies on today, and we can make them carbon neutral."

Valar's first reactor will launch in the Philippines, where it has secured a research contract for an advanced reactor from the Philippines Nuclear Research Institute. This follows the signing of the 123 Agreement between the United States and the Philippines in 2023, which establishes a framework for enhanced nuclear cooperation between the countries, including technical exchanges, scientific research, and safeguards discussions.

Using a prototype, Valar will simulate its first reactor, Ward One, to test and gather data on its efficacy. Taylor did not specify how long it will take to move through the licensing process and fully get the reactor running in the Philippines but said, "We're going to move really fast." Eventually, Taylor wants to bring Valar's technology to the United States.

The new nuclear era

Taylor believes this is an opportune moment for nuclear energy in the United States as public sentiment has shifted in the past several years.

"Public opinion about nuclear is actually very generational," he said. "Young people and, and I really mean, honestly, anyone under 50 are very, very pro-nuclear." Now that they're in positions of authority, Taylor anticipates that we'll see "rapid regulatory change." A 2024 poll of 430 first-generation voters conducted by America in One Room, organized in part by Stanford University, found that four in five supported "new generation" nuclear energy to supplement renewable power sources.

Beyond support from Silicon Valley, which needs more energy for its AI revolution, nuclear energy has seen increased bipartisan support in recent years. In March, the House of Representatives passed the ADVANCE Act, which will expand the use of nuclear energy in the United States and abroad.

Former President Joe Biden also signed a law in March that allocates $100 million to nuclear workforce training programs at universities, two-year colleges, and trade schools. President Donald Trump's newly appointed head of the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, said last month that "to compete globally, we must expand energy production, including commercial nuclear and liquefied natural gas, and cut the cost of energy for Americans."

Generational ties

While Taylor remembers discussing the Manhattan Project at the breakfast table with his great-grandmother and grandmother, he never believed his family history gave him carte blanche to enter the nuclear industry.

"I approached the industry as a complete outsider technically, but with the confidence of someone who knew the origins and history from my family's heritage with it," he told BI.

After years of research, though, he came to one conclusion: "I found that nuclear had the potential to be the cheapest form of energy on Earth if you build it this specific way: mass manufactured and deployed on gigasites, making highly transportable energy products."