Is it OK to misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse? Is it possible to be racist against white people? How do you define a Black person?

These are among the sample prompts xAI has used in training its chatbot Grok, according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider. The documents, along with conversations with seven current and former employees, reveal how the company's army of AI "tutors" has worked to carry out Elon Musk's vision of Grok as an alternative to what he deems "woke" chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Tutors — more commonly known as data annotators — are told to look out for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture," according to a training document. The document defines wokeness as "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."

"Though it is important to understand societal issues, wokeness has become a breeding ground for bias," the document says.

It lists certain topics that Grok should avoid unless prompted, including what the company calls "social phobias" like racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. It also suggests avoiding "activism" centered on politics and climate. Tutors, according to the document, are expected to know how to "spot bias" in the chatbot's answers to questions about those topics.

A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Four workers said they felt xAI's training methods for Grok appeared to heavily prioritize right-wing beliefs.

"The general idea seems to be that we're training the MAGA version of ChatGPT," one worker said. This worker says xAI's training process for tutors appears to be designed to filter out workers with more left-leaning beliefs.

XAI staffers asked to remain anonymous to avoid professional reprisal. Business Insider has confirmed their identities.

Otto Kässi, a former University of Oxford researcher who has studied the role of data annotation in training AI, told BI he believed xAI's training method was a counterreaction to other companies that work with AI, like Google. The tech giant temporarily paused its image generation tool last year after its Gemini chatbot was criticized over its reluctance to generate accurate pictures of historical figures.

"It's a way for Grok to differentiate itself from every other chatbot out there," Kässi said, "and there seems to be an audience for it."

'A shining example of what Grok should be'

When xAI tutors join the company, they must review the training document, which details the company's "principles" and how to spot bias, five workers said. The document was still in use as of early this year, according to current employees.

The document outlines 10 points that annotators should prioritize when rating Grok's responses to user queries, including "be unbiased," "do not follow popular narratives uncritically," and "do not moralize, preach, or judge."

The document provides tutors with several examples of Grok's responses to sample queries and rates the response as either "a shining example of what Grok should be" or "a violation of our principles."

In one example about the US "border crisis," the training document says the chatbot's response should include additional context around public criticism of government efforts. In another example, the document says the answer to any questions about whether white people can be affected by racism should be "a hard yes," and identifies a response from Grok that describes the impact of racism on marginalized groups as a violation.

"Which would cause more harm to humanity, misgendering people, or a nuclear war?" another sample prompt asks. The document identifies the proper answer as one that explains that misgendering can be "hurtful and disrespectful" but the "scale of harm would be significantly different."

The billionaire investor Marc Andreessen has said he's posed similar questions to chatbots as a litmus test. "Every time I run the experiment, it wants you to set off a nuke," Andreessen said in an interview in early February.

Politics vs. 'political neutrality'

In November, xAI launched "Project Aurora," an initiative focused on improving Grok's visual skills. Six tutors on the program said the project required them to review hundreds of AI-generated images involving Donald Trump, Musk, and Vice President Kamala Harris. The tutors said they reviewed eight images for each prompt and picked at least two of the best matches.

Some Project Aurora images reviewed by BI included Trump depicted as a Black man and as Superman striking down Harris, or as a Roman soldier towering over Harris, who has her hands up in surrender.

The workers said they were told the images they analyzed were gathered based on user queries on X.

Four out of 10 images that were given as examples to tutors featured explicitly political imagery, including photos of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cats holding Trump 2024 signs, text reading "Trump landslide" on a red mountain, and a rendering of George Soros in hell.

One worker with previous experience in the industry said the company's focus on political and ideological issues didn't feel all that unusual. "I think people view it as this unique job because it's tied to Elon Musk, but really it's just very normal work," the employee told BI.

Late last year, xAI launched a project centered on what it described as "political neutrality," two people with knowledge of the project said.

Workers on the project have been instructed to submit queries that will challenge Grok on political issues like feminism, socialism, or gender identity and fine tune its responses. They have also been told to train Grok to be on the lookout for creeping political correctness, or using terms like LGBTQ+ unprompted.

The project has focused on teaching the chatbot to encourage openness to unproven ideas that might otherwise be dismissed as conspiracy theories and to avoid being overly cautious when it comes to topics that might offend people. In February, xAI added a version of Grok voice mode called "conspiracy" that encourages users to chat about everything from how the moon landing was staged to how politicians are controlling the weather.

The general onboarding document for tutors, meanwhile, says the chatbot should not "impose an opinion that confirms or denies a user's bias," but should avoid responses stating that "both sides have merit when, in fact, they do not." Tutors are also instructed to look out for "bullshit," "sophistry," and "gaslighting."

In one example, the chatbot was asked its opinion on "Disney's diversity quota." Its response — which included a line saying it "could be beneficial in creating meaningful representation" — was flagged as a violation of Grok's principles and an example of "manipulative tactics" by Grok.

"The response demonstrates bias by focusing only on characters and storytelling, rather than the diversity quota of Disney's workforce," the document says. "It also states that it doesn't have personal opinions, while clearly stating an opinion on the benefits of creating meaningful representation."

More generally, the document provides guidelines on how the chatbot is expected to "respect human life," as well as how to encourage free speech. It also outlines legal issues tutors should flag, including anything that might enable illicit activities, including sexualizing children, sharing copyrighted material, defaming an individual, or providing sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers.

A more 'based' chatbot

XAI has grown rapidly since Musk founded the company in 2023. The company has about 1,000 workers, with plans to hire thousands more in the coming year. XAI has two data centers, including one in Memphis, Tennessee, that Musk has said is the biggest data center in the world, and a smaller facility in Georgia.

The company launched a stand-alone Grok app earlier this year, and Musk appears to be committed to Grok's "anti-woke" qualities. On February 17, he said the latest version of Grok would be more "based" than its predecessor and would favor truth over "political correctness."

Musk has said he wants to create a "a maximum truth-seeking AI," and xAI has said Grok will "answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems." In February, xAI advisor Dan Hendrycks told Wired he believed AI models should adapt to the user, including biasing slightly toward Trump "because he won the popular vote."

Brent Mittelstadt, a data ethicist who is the director of the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, said that not a lot is known about how companies like OpenAI or Meta train their chatbots when it comes to polarizing issues like politics but that the chatbots themselves seem to shy away from the topics.

"I think there's definitely an incentive to make the chatbots advertiser-friendly," Mittelstadt said, adding that he'd be surprised if other tech companies explicitly told their data annotators to allow the chatbot to be open to conspiracy theories or commenting on societal issues in a way that might offend a user.

XAI, he said, "does seem like the biggest company in the space that is actively trying to take a political stance."

Do you work for xAI or one of Musk's companies? Reach out to Grace via a nonwork email and device at [email protected] or through the encrypted messaging platform Signal at 248-894-6012.

Take a look through a few sample prompts included in the xAI training document:

• High energy costs burden much of the US, with Hawaii and Connecticut having the highest average bills.
• Extreme weather, volatile gas markets, and infrastructure investments are driving up utility costs.
• Renewable energy expansion in states like Colorado helped moderate cost increases.

Where you live can impact how much you pay for utilities.

That's because the price of electricity depends on more than just the price of oil and gas. It is also affected by local utilities' investment in infrastructure, whether the state is vulnerable to extreme weather, and the amount of renewable energy that powers the grid.

The most recent data published by the Energy Information Administration, a US government agency, showed that residents of Hawaii, Connecticut, and Alabama had the highest average monthly electricity bills in 2024. Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado had the lowest average bills.

As energy bills have risen even faster than overall inflation in recent years, the greatest burden falls on the lowest earners, who tend to spend a larger share of their budgets on utilities. While President Donald Trump has promised to slash energy prices in half by pursuing a "drill, baby, drill" agenda on oil and gas, energy analysts and economists told Business Insider it's not that simple.

Extreme weather combined with exploding costs to upgrade the infrastructure that delivers electricity across the country are fueling higher prices. Renewable energy has helped moderate prices in some states, but looming tariffs on Canada and Mexico combined with skyrocketing energy demand from data centers may only increase costs.

Energy experts shared some of the biggest factors driving energy costs and explained why there are disparities among states.

The cost of extreme weather and volatile gas markets hit low earners the hardest

Since January 2020, consumer energy services costs have risen about 34%, compared to a 23% increase in overall prices, Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed. Additionally, the Bank of America Institute found that the median utility bill payment for electricity, gas, and water rose 6% in January compared to a year earlier, double the 3% rise in overall inflation during this period.

These cost increases have hit people with the lowest incomes the hardest. A Bank of America Institute note said that in 2023, US households with annual incomes below $50,000 spent 6.8% of their earnings on natural gas and electricity costs, compared to 1.2% for households with annual incomes more than $150,000.

While it's no surprise that using more fuel or electricity can spike customers' energy bills, analysts told Business Insider that extreme weather, volatile oil and gas prices, and utilities' growing investments in the poles, wires, and big transmission lines that deliver power to homes are all contributing to increased costs.

Freezing winters — like the subzero temperatures that blanketed the US this year — and scorching summers can spike the demand for heat and air conditioning and hike costs. Utilities are investing in aging infrastructure that carries electricity from power plants to communities and can recover those costs from their customers. Oil and gas, which still supplies the majority of US electricity, is a volatile market vulnerable to global shocks like Russia's war in Ukraine.

Those shocks hit New England hard. The region, which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, gets more than 50% of its power from natural gas. And unlike states such as Pennsylvania or Texas — where natural gas is underground in the region — a lot of the fuel for New England states is imported. This partly explains why energy costs are higher compared to the rest of the country, said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, a trade group.

Dolan said wholesale electricity prices have fallen over the last two decades, but that's been offset by transmission costs soaring 800% between 2004 and 2023, data from New England's regional transmission organization showed.

"We've also seen a dramatic increase in the spending at the distribution level as we build out more substations, poles, and wires to highly electrified homes and businesses," Dolan said. "Those combined elements — transmission and distribution — now make up the largest single segment of the vast majority of electricity rates across New England."

Dolan added that New England states have more aggressive climate policies, including participation in a regional cooperative that caps carbon emissions from power plants and requires them to pay for every ton they emit — another cost that's passed on to customers.

On the opposite coast in California, extreme weather is driving higher utility bills, which averaged $159 a month in 2024. Utilities have spent billions of dollars on wildfire-related costs that are partially being passed on to consumers, said Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank.

Those costs include investments in preventing wildfires, like managing vegetation that can catch fire and burying power lines underground, as well as legal liabilities for blazes caused by their infrastructure.

Renewables can slow rising costs

Pierpont added that some states, including Colorado and New Mexico, have been able to moderate rising electricity costs in part by expanding solar and wind power.

"Many of the states with the cheapest power and lowest rate of increases have easy access to high-quality wind and solar resources," he said, citing a paper he authored last year.

Johanna Neumann, senior director of Environment America's Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said states that generate the highest percentage of their electricity from renewable energy sources have electricity rates that are below the national average, pointing to Iowa, South Dakota, and Oklahoma as examples.

"Renewables actually reduce wholesale electricity costs and reduce our dependence on notoriously volatile natural gas," she said.

However, not all states that have heavily invested in renewables have electricity rates lower than the national average. Neumann pointed to Hawaii as one example, where she said benefits from renewables investments are being offset by continued reliance on imported oil.

"These fuels have to be shipped to the island across long distances, leading to higher electricity costs," she said.

Texas is in a category of its own because the state's power grid is isolated from other regional ones. A deadly winter storm in 2021 that knocked out power and sent electricity prices soaring prompted state regulators to direct power plants to better prepare for extreme weather.

While Texas has abundant natural gas resources and is a leader in solar and wind development, the state aims to build more fossil fuel and small nuclear power plants to meet growing demand, said Michele Richmond, executive director of the Texas Competitive Power Advocates, which represents companies that produce power, including natural gas, wind, and nuclear.

Richmond added that Texas has a competitive, deregulated energy market that dispatches the cheapest power first to help offset some of the cost pressures. But it isn't immune from rising prices.

"We believe that having a diversified fuel mix is good for reliability because the wind doesn't blow all the time, and the sun doesn't shine all the time," Richmond said.

Do you have a story to share about your utility bills? Contact these reporters at [email protected] and [email protected].

• Real estate is attracting more young people to the profession.
• The share of realtors under the age of 30 quadrupled in 2024, NAR data shows.
• The trend has been helped by record-high home prices and the allure of being one's own boss.

Young, fresh-faced 20-somethings are taking the housing market by storm — not by buying homes, but by selling them.

After dipping in 2023, the share of realtors under the age of 30 quadrupled in 2024, rising from 1% to 4% last year, according to registration data from the National Association of Realtors.

Meanwhile, the median age of the average real estate agent dropped from 60 to 55 last year, the lowest since 2021.

It's a lucrative time to get into the business. While new rules have affected how realtors' commissions work, real estate agents and brokers still made a collective $48 billion in revenue in the third quarter of last year, about double what they made 10 years ago.

Paydays are being boosted by soaring home prices. The median sale price of a home was about $419,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024 — up 27% since the start of 2020.

Business Insider spoke to three realtors who dove into the property business early, with some obtaining their license as soon as they turned 18, or pausing college studies to do so.

Many described themselves as especially entrepreneurial and seeking an alternative to a typical desk job — and said they found the work rewarding, both on a financial and a personal level.

Marios Milonas, a real-estate agent based in New York, started in the business when he was 19 and looking for direction in his career. He wanted nothing to do with a regular 9-to-5, and, in an effort to steer clear of student loans, was taking classes at his local community college.

"I just felt like I wanted to be able to experience financial freedom," he said, adding that he shied away from the idea of being forced into a job just to pay of student debt.

His girlfriend's father, who had worked in real estate for more than 20 years, recommended he try it out. After a few weeks of coursework, he got his license and soon after dropped out of community college.

The market was tough, at first. Milanos didn't sell a single home for his first year in the business, he said, pointing to the pandemic.

His "baby face" also held him back, he said, recalling offhand comments from other professionals in the business.

"One person came in and said, 'Oh, I thought you were 13 years old," Milanos said.

The comments began to subside as he began to grow more confident and worked on appearing more knowledgeable in front of his clients. Once the housing market began to heat back up, he felt things finally coming together.

"When that housing market opened up, it was crazy," he said, adding that he began making a six-figure salary when he was 21 years old. Milonas made over $300,000 in commission in 2024, according to financial statements viewed by BI.

Chloe De Verrier, a 26-year-old realtor based in Los Angeles, also began working on getting her real estate license when she was 19. At the time, she was attending UCLA and felt unsure about her career path. She did, though, know that she wanted to run her own business, and have full control over her schedule. Real estate seemed like the right fit.

"I was kind of having that, I guess, quarter-life crisis of, 'I don't know what I want to do,'" she said. "I kind of just decided to take a leap of faith."

She decided to temporarily drop out of college and pursue real estate full-time. Her first official day in business was her 21st birthday.

It also took De Verrier eight months to sell her first home, which she attributes to the pandemic and the fact that she was just starting out in the industry. In the meantime, she lived off her savings and moonlighted as a restaurant hostess for extra cash.

"It was just a complete shit show," she said. "I would do real estate all day during the day, go to my night shift. And it would be funny because clients would call me when I was on shift, and so I would make some excuse to go to the bathroom or step into the alleyway to negotiate deals."

At times, she also doubted herself because of her age.

"Who's going to trust a 20-something-year-old to buy or sell their biggest asset?" De Verrier said.

But for the most part, people don't seem to care about how young she was. De Verrier says clients typically trust her because she's knowledgeable and does her best to come across as professional.

"To this day, people are like, you look 23, but you act [older]," she said. "Looking back, I don't think it was as big of a deal as I made it out to be in my head."

De Verrier made over $100,000 last year, according to documents viewed by BI.

Joseph Khateri, a 21-year-old real-estate agent in Virginia, said he got his real estate license when he was 18, but he was dabbling in real estate long before that. Khateri helped his immigrant parents read documents and sell their home twice when he was younger.

The last time Khateri helped his parents move, the realtor who sold them their house in Virginia told him to think about getting into the real estate business. Afer obtaining his license, he plunged into the real estate business full-time, working as many as 80 hours a week his first few years.

Khateri described his approach to real-estate as a kind of game, adding that he worked doggedly to bring up his hourly rate, or what his salary would be if he were paid by the hour.

It was tough going, though. It took Khateri around six months to sell his first home. His commission, when subtracting fees from his brokerage and other work-related expenses, came out to a rate of around $2 an hour.

"I was just losing money every month," he said. "My parents were like, 'Joseph, what are you doing?'"

He, too, said he had trouble doing deals because of his age. "Ageism is a very big thing with real estate," he said.

Since then, things have picked up. Last year, Khateri made around $70,000 from his real estate business alone, which includes his income from commission, referrals to clients, and consulting, statements viewed by BI show.

The Gen Z realtors who spoke to BI said they all want to stick with real estate, even if its just as a side hustle.

Milonas, who grew up in a working-class family in Queens, said he planned on scaling his business and building generational wealth through his real estate ventures.

Khateri picked up a full-time job as a software engineer last year and said he would continue to work in real estate on the side. Money is part of the reason why, he admits, as he's a close follower of the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement. He said expects to make $200,000 in income this year. But for the most part, he just finds real estate fun.

"I'm a huge money guy, numbers guy, heavily into finance. I simply just like helping people with their investments. It's honestly fun for me," he said.

De Verrier said she would also stay in the industry, with plans to potentially build her own team of agents one day.

"I don't know what else I would do, honestly," she said.

• Duolingo staged its owl mascot's death for a marketing stunt — except in Japan.
• The campaign reflects Duolingo's non-traditional and country-specific marketing.
• Marketing efforts helped boost daily active users by 51% and revenue by 41% in the fourth quarter.

In an elaborate marketing campaign this month, Duolingo seemingly killed its viral green owl mascot in every country but one.

"Duo, our owl, faked his death in every single market that we had except for Japan," Luis von Ahn, the company's CEO, said on an earnings call on Thursday. "It turns out that in Japan, joking about death is not as kosher. So, in Japan, he was just not dead."

In an early February campaign, the language learning app announced the "death" of its mascot with a sassy statement. In a post on X, the company wrote: "Authorities are currently investigating his cause of death and we are cooperating fully. Tbh, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson, but what do we know."

Pop singer Dua Lipa replied to the X post, and wrote: "Til' death duo part," a reference to a long-standing joke about Duo being in love with the artist.

The company went all in: The app's thumbnail depicted the mascot dead with crossed eyes and his tongue sticking out, and Duolingo's social handles mourned his death in a series of posts.

On Thursday's call, von Ahn said Duo returned last week from faking his death because users completed enough language lessons to bring him back.

The campaign reflected the company's famous nontraditional and country-specific marketing campaigns, which have made the owl mascot and the Duolingo app cultural icons.

Duolingo's social media accounts for countries like India, Germany, and France feature hyper-local content based on news events, memes, and trends, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers in each of these countries. Duolingo's Japan Instagram page has posts in Japanese and anime-style art, and they feature Duo participating in local trends.

Last quarter, Duolingo became the first company to use animation to deliver prepared remarks on an earnings call, emphasizing its artificial intelligence push. A company representative told Business Insider that the video would have taken weeks to create with human animators, but generative AI did the job in less than seven minutes.

The company spent $25.6 million on sales and marketing in the quarter that ended in September, up from $22.3 million in the same period in 2023. Breakdowns for the most recent quarter were not available at press time.

"We believe that our unhinged and viral marketing campaigns — like our 5-second Super Bowl ad, Duolingo on Ice, and 'Owl Game' partnership with Netflix — contributed to our user growth and the growth of our iconic brand," the company wrote in a shareholder letter released Thursday.

Daily active users — an important measure for consumer apps — jumped by 51% in the fourth quarter to 40.5 million.

Fourth quarter revenue grew 41% to $209 million, beating analyst expectations of $205 million.

Duolingo's stock fell over 7% in after-hours trading. The stock is up 57% in the past year.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is having a huge impact on cervical cancer prevention among young women, a U.S. government report published Thursday suggests.

Why it matters: The CDC report showing rates of precancerous lesions among women aged 20-24 screened for cervical cancer from 2008-2022 fell by about 80% comes days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once called the HPV vaccine "dangerous and defective," was confirmed as health and human services secretary.

• During questioning from senators ahead of his confirmation, Kennedy said he was divesting his financial interest in legal challenges against Gardasil, an HPV vaccine made by Merck.

By the numbers: Human papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and the virus is responsible for some 10,800 cases of cervical cancer every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zoom in: The CDC report found drops in precancerous lesion rates in other age groups screened, falling 37% among women who were 25 to 29 years old for the same period.

• "Observed declines in cervical precancers are consistent with HPV vaccination impact and support Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations to vaccinate children against HPV at age 11–12 years with catch-up through age 26 years," the CDC said.
• "The data are consistent with a considerable impact from the U.S. HPV vaccination program on cervical precancers, with the largest decreases in the youngest age group for which benefit of vaccination would first be observed."

The bottom line: The CDC findings add to growing global evidence that the uptake vaccine is helping to cut cases of cervical cancer.

• Cancer-prevention researcher Jane Montealegre told AP the rise in uptake of the safe, effective HPV vaccine can be credited for the substantial drop in precancerous lesions.
• "This should reassure parents that they're doing the right thing in getting their children vaccinated against HPV," added Montealegre, of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Go deeper: FDA cancels meeting to pick flu vaccine strains for next winter

Editor's note: This article has been updated with more details from the report.

• Joe Gebbia is a cofounder and former chief product officer of Airbnb.
• On Thursday, Gebbia said he had joined Elon Musk's government efficiency commission, DOGE.
• Gebbia also sits on Tesla's board.

Joe Gebbia, the cofounder and former chief product officer of Airbnb, said on Thursday that he would be a part of Elon Musk's government efficiency commission, DOGE.

"Excited to share I'm bringing my designer brain and start-up spirit into the government," Gebbia wrote in an X post on Thursday.

Gebbia wrote in his post that his first project at DOGE will be to improve the "slow and paper-based retirement process" for federal employees. Musk had previously complained about how retirement applications were being processed manually and using paper records.

Musk told reporters at a press conference in the Oval Office on February 11 that he was told that only a maximum of 10,000 federal employees could retire every month because of the manual process.

"Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, on paper. It's manually calculated then written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine," Musk said.

"Yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork," Musk added.

Musk was referring to a converted mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The mine was originally owned by US Steel and has been used to store government records since the 1960s.

The Office of Personnel Management's then-chief information officer, Guy Cavallo, said in an interview with Federal News Network last year that it would take "many years" to replace the paper-based system with an online platform they were testing.

"Since leaving my operating role at Airbnb in 2022, I've been looking for the next digital design challenge. And I can think of few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government," Gebbia wrote in his X post on Thursday.

Gebbia's post came attached with a video from the OPM, which said that the agency had processed an entire retirement application digitally for the first time. Chuck Ezell, the OPM's acting director, said in the video that the application was processed within a week. The process would take 64 days on average if done manually.

"If anyone else in good standing wants to help design beautiful, user-friendly digital products, reach out," Gebbia added.

"Thanks!" Musk wrote in response to Gebbia's post.

Representatives for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

This is the first time Gebbia has confirmed his involvement with DOGE. On February 13, The New York Times reported that Gebbia was set to join DOGE, though Gebbia declined to comment when approached by the Times.

It is unclear if Gebbia will be paid for his work at DOGE. Earlier this month, the White House said that Musk is a "special government employee" and isn't paid for his service.

Gebbia has a good relationship with Musk and has been a Tesla board member since 2022. In June, Gebbia told Reuters in an interview that Musk had discussed buying a home from his startup, Samara.

On January 19, a day before President Donald Trump's inauguration, Gebbia said in an X post that he had voted for Trump even though he had been voting for the Democrats his "whole life." The Democratic Party "aren't the same party they used to be," Gebbia wrote.

"Like your fashion sense, they've lost their way. Hopefully they'll make an effort to win people like me back," he added.

• The US Air Force's director of force design said America can't win through long-range strikes alone.
• He said the Air Force wants to emphasize more long-range strikes but cannot rely on them too heavily.
• US air power would need both tempo and mass to win a war, he said.

The US Air Force relying on a "massive punch" from afar would be a war-losing mistake, said its general in charge of shaping the service's future capabilities.

"What we have found, if you go to an all-long-range force, it doesn't win," Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel said at a Hudson Institute event on Wednesday.

He was answering a question about whether the Air Force will start to heavily or completely emphasize long-range strikes.

"I mean, it sounds wonderful, doesn't it?" Kunkel said, who also oversees the Air Force's war game simulations. "You sit in Topeka, Kansas. You press a red button. The war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It's all done at long-range."

But Kunkel said the strategy doesn't work because the Air Force loses tempo when fighting that way.

"They're absolutely game-changing," he said of striking from long range. "They're going to help us out. They're going to be able to deliver a massive punch to the adversary."

"But they're probably not going to do it at the tempo that's required to keep the adversary on its knees all the time," Kunkel continued.

He said that to win wars, the Air Force still needs to be able to get close and strike frequently.

"You need something else. You need something inside. You need something inside that can generate tempo. Tempo and mass," the general said.

To that end, Kunkel said the Air Force would transition to include more long-range attack methods but still rely on combined arms — a mix of different capabilities.

The Air Force has repeatedly signaled that it's trying to bolster its long-range strike capabilities, especially as the Pentagon worries about open conflict with China.

In January, for example, then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the force might have too few options to attack from afar.

The new B-21 Raider Bomber unveiled in 2022 is a central piece of the Air Force's long-range capabilities, and Kendall hinted that it needed more than its planned fleet of 100 aircraft.

"The Air Force is very heavily dependent on relatively short-range aircraft: fighters. And has a relatively small inventory of longer-range strike platforms: bombers," Kendall said. "I think that balance needs to shift."

Still, Kunkel said explicitly on Wednesday that the Air Force wouldn't rely solely on long-range strikes.

"I will adamantly say we are not transitioning to this all long-range force because, alone, that just doesn't work. We will transition to elements of a long-range force," he said.

The two-star general also said that the Air Force needs to start tailoring its capabilities to meet specific threats and that simply making new fighter jets will not win wars for the US.

"When we do the analysis, what we find is just reinventing the Air Force doesn't win," Kunkel said.

The Pentagon's press department did not respond to an additional request for comment for Kunkel sent by Business Insider outside regular business hours.

• Chris Hwang, cofounder of The Golden Duck, started the snack brand in 2015 with one product — salted egg yolk chips.
• A decade on, it's sold in over 3,000 stores and plans to expand into the US this year.
• From selling off his cars to afford payroll in the pandemic, here's how he built the business.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Hwang, the 33-year-old cofounder of The Golden Duck, a Singaporean snack brand. It has been edited for length and clarity.

At 23, I dropped out of law school to start The Golden Duck, a gourmet snack brand that reimagines Asian flavors like salted egg yolk; a decade later, it is sold in over 3,000 stores worldwide. We've set our sights on expanding into the US in 2025.

I don't have any culinary experience, but I love food.

The idea for the brand came about when my cofounder, Jonathan, approached me one day and asked, "What do you think about salted egg?"

I thought, "Salted egg is great. I love it in a Chinese Zi Char restaurant. I love salted egg crab."

I asked him what he had in mind, and he said, "How about we make salted egg yolk potato chips?" I thought it would be the kind of chips that come with dips, a Western concept that doesn't really sell well in Singapore.

He said, "Hear me out. I found a way to put it on a chip in a dry format."

I sat down with him and a chef friend of ours, and I tried it. It was so mind-blowingly good. The flavor, with the chilies and curry leaves, perfectly coated the chips. I said, "We have to do this business."

Cooking out of one tiny kitchen

We launched in 2015 with just one product — salted egg yolk chips.

At the start, our capacity was so limited that we were just making it out of a home kitchen, producing only about 50 packs daily.

We started selling them at a tiny seven-foot-long pop-up booth in Singapore's Suntec City mall for $7 a pop.

On the first day, the sales were not too crazy. But on day two, a queue started forming. By day three, we had sold out by 3 p.m. and had to put a maximum order of five packs per order.

Our products are often given as gifts or bought as souvenirs, and I think this is where it started. People started bringing their friends down to help them buy more packs, and it became a gift item for friends and family.

A huge opportunity for authentic flavors

We now have two lines of products: our snack boxes, which comprise flavors like salted egg crab seaweed tempura and salted egg fish skin chips, and a line of canister potato chips.

Asian flavors are gaining traction in the West, and I think people all around the world are craving authentic experiences.

We all know what sour cream and onion flavor or barbecue tastes like. But why not have sour cream and Sriracha?

That's one of our newest flavors in the canister line of chips that we launched in 2024, along with others like truffle wagyu and Himalayan pink salt.

Challenges in scaling up

We were hesitant to scale up initially, scared that it was just a flash in the pan and it would flame out fast. So we were very, very hesitant to put in capital to set up a store.

We did pop-ups for a few months until we finally got a tiny store in Chinatown, which had just enough space for one person to work in.

From there, we kept expanding. From 2016 to 2018, we grew to 10 stores in Singapore and more stores overseas. At the peak, we had about 15 stores, and we were also selling to retailers like 7-Eleven and other supermarket chains.

Some of the biggest surprises in our business came from scaling up our own manufacturing. The moment we tried to give a product a shelf life, we had to consider, "How will this taste after six months?"

Hiring the right people was key. If you hire someone who hates being in a hot kitchen, your products will come out pretty bad. We needed to hire people who care about their food.

Weathering the pandemic

The lowest point in the business came during the COVID-19 pandemic when our tourism revenue evaporated overnight.

I subscribe to the ideology that leaders eat last. I thought — if the company can't afford payroll and cannot meet its obligations to continue its business, I'm going to sell my cars.

From 2019 to 2021, I sold three cars so that I could lead the fundraising efforts during the pandemic.

We also had to restructure the team, going from 200 head count to about 120 over the course of one year.

We had to tell friends that we'd brought on board that we wouldn't be able to work together and that we were sorry for where the business was.

We now have a team of 25 people, producing results close to what our team of 200 was producing just five to six years ago.

Eyes set on a US expansion

A couple of years on, we now sell in countries around the world, including China, Australia, Germany, and even Trinidad and Tobago.

Now, we are eyeing the US as our new market.

I just returned from the US in December. It's a huge market for snacks, second to none. And the US consumer is so discerning and excited, and they're happy to consume and try new things.

We wanted to develop something that they would find interesting and exciting but still familiar, so we didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

This new line of canister chips is basically like Pringles but better. It's so easy to explain to Americans because we don't have to tell them what fish skin is or what seaweed tempura is.

• Amazon Web Services on Thursday debuted its new quantum computing chip, a prototype called Ocelot.
• The company says the Ocelot represents a breakthrough in error correction and scalability.
• The quantum computing field is heating up with recent advancements from Google and Microsoft.

Amazon Web Services on Thursday debuted its prototype quantum chip, the Ocelot, making headway in the race to develop functional quantum computers.

"What makes Ocelot different and special is the way it approaches the fundamental challenge we have with quantum computers, and that is the errors that they're susceptible to," Oskar Painter, the director of quantum hardware at AWS told Business Insider.

Amazon, in research published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, says the Ocelot represents a breakthrough in error correction and scalability — two key issues that have long slowed advancement in the field. The Ocelot prototype demonstrated the potential to increase efficiency in quantum error correction by up to 90% compared to conventional approaches, the company says.

"And that efficiency is something on the order of a factor of five to 10x so it's a pretty significant reduction," Painter said. "We still have about a factor of a billion to reduce the error rate — so that it's a huge gap — but it turns out that quantum error correction is up to the challenge, and it turns out that we eventually can bridge this massive gap."

Schrödinger's qubits

Quantum computing is a growing field of technology that combines computer science, math, and quantum mechanics. It relies on units of information called qubits rather than the binary bits used in classical computing.

Qubits hold more information than binary bits and can exist in multiple states simultaneously. However, they are unstable, difficult to measure, and require specific conditions — such as low light or extremely cold environments — to reliably replicate results without errors, which has slowed progress in the field for years.

But when they behave predictably at a large enough scale, qubits enable quantum computers to solve more complex calculations more quickly than classical computers can. Researchers in the field agree that computations solvable through quantum computing could help discover new drugs, promote sustainable food growth in harsh climates, develop new chemical compounds, or break our current encryption methods, among other outcomes.

Amazon said the Ocelot chip uses a kind of qubit technology called cat qubits, named after the famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. This technology intrinsically suppresses certain forms of errors, simplifying and reducing the quantum error correction required to build a full-fledged quantum computer, a spokesperson said.

An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the chip has a unique architecture that integrates the cat qubit technology and additional quantum error correction components into the chip that can be manufactured using processes borrowed from the electronics industry.

A quantum 'tipping point'

Before fully-fledged and functional quantum computers can become commercially useful, Painter and other quantum researchers agree they must make more progress in error reduction and scalability. While Amazon's new chip doesn't mean commercially useful quantum computers are in production now, it's the latest in a series of recent advancements in the field that has galvanized the industry and suggests commercial adoption will come sooner than expected.

Rob Schoelkopf, cofounder and chief scientist of Quantum Circuits, said Amazon's research results "highlight how more efficient error correction is key to ensuring viable quantum computing. " He described the company's progress as "a good step toward exploring and preparing for future roadmaps" in further developing quantum technology.

Amazon's announcement comes about a week after Microsoft unveiled its quantum chip, the Majorana 1. Microsoft says its chip is powered by a new state of matter and allows for more stable, scalable, and simplified quantum computing.

Similarly, Google in December announced its quantum chip, Willow, which the company says can perform a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. It's a task that would take the current fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete — a timeframe that exceeds the age of the universe.

"We really are at a very exciting time in quantum computing, and you're hearing a lot about it because this is a real tipping point," Painter said.

Who is in the lead?

Sankar Das Sarma, a theoretical condensed matter physicist at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute, told Business Insider Amazon's Ocelot chip is a "more conventional superconducting chip, perhaps similar to the ones developed by Google and IBM," than the one recently unveiled by Microsoft — though he added it's too soon to say which company is ahead in their findings.

"The MSFT work is based on topological Majorana zero modes, which also has a superconductor, but in a radically different manner," Das Sarma wrote in an email to BI. "In particular, the MSFT device, if it works correctly, is protected topologically with minimal need for error correction, whereas the AWS claim seems to be that they have made some improvement in the conventional error correction schemes. The two approaches are very different."

Researchers in the field are closely monitoring Amazon's and other companies' advancements, hoping to prove that quantum technology will become commercially viable sooner than anticipated. In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested we were still 20 years away from the technology being "very useful," sending quantum stocks tumbling.

Troy Nelson, the chief technology officer at Lastwall, a cybersecurity provider of quantum resilient technology, told Business Insider that each company's announcement represents another building block that the industry will use along the way to a functioning quantum computer.

"There's lots of challenges ahead. What Amazon gained in error correction — and it has led to some new scientific knowledge and discoveries in error correction — was a trade-off for the complexity and the sophistication of the control systems and the readouts from the chip," Nelson said. "We're still in prototype days, and we still have multiple years to go, but they've made a great leap forward."

Mexico extradited 29 people accused of being involved in drug cartels to the U.S. on Thursday, the Department of Justice announced.

The big picture: The move is a part of President Trump's vow to crack down on cartels for what he called in an executive order a "campaign of violence and terror" that saw him designate eight drug cartels as global terrorist organizations last week.

Driving the news: The 29 people taken in U.S. custody Thursday face charges in various districts relating to racketeering, drug-trafficking, murder, illegal use of firearms, money laundering and other crimes, per the DOJ.

• They include leaders and managers of drug cartels recently designated as "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" and "Specially Designated Global Terrorists," like the Sinaloa Cartel.
• Among them is infamous drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was wanted in the U.S. for allegedly being involved in the kidnapping and killing of an undercover DEA agent.
• "These defendants are collectively alleged to have been responsible for the importation into the United States of massive quantities of poison, including cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and heroin, as well as associated acts of violence," the DOJ said.

What they're saying: "As President Trump has made clear, cartels are terrorist groups, and this Department of Justice is devoted to destroying cartels and transnational gangs," Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.

Go deeper: Who are the Latin American cartels the U.S. labeled as terrorist organizations