• Elon Musk says Department of Government Efficiency works 120 hours a week.
• Musk's is trying to cut a $1 trillion or more from the federal budget.
• Some executives told BI that Musk's posts are meant to set the tone for the work culture he expects.

It's been just under two weeks since Elon Musk stepped into his role at the Department of Government Efficiency, and he's already bringing his Silicon Valley drive to Washington.

"DOGE is working 120 hours a week. Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast," Musk posted to X on Sunday.

Less than a day earlier, he had extolled the virtues of weekend work.

"Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it's like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!" he wrote on X.

That's 17 hours and 8 minutes of work a day, including Saturday and Sunday, as one X user noted in the comments.

Musk is known for his relentless work ethic. He's said he works 120-hour weeks and expects his employees to work long hours, too.

When he officially took control of Twitter in October 2022, he immediately mandated 80-hour workweeks. But whether his hard-charging tech executive mentality will work in the more staid realm of government is an open question.

An operational efficiency expert told Business Insider that Musk's approach might be the best way to get DOGE quickly up to speed.

"Musk's tweet underscores his well-known philosophy on work ethic and the inefficiencies of bureaucracy," Shannon Copeland, CEO of SIB, a cost-cutting firm, told BI by text. "While a 120-hour workweek isn't a practical or sustainable solution for most, the principle behind it resonates. Companies that prioritize efficiency, automation, and proactive cost management will always outperform those weighed down by bureaucracy."

Roi Ginat, CEO of Endless AI, which developed a video AI assistant and has raised $100 million, said Musk's posts shouldn't be taken literally.

"Driving a team too hard for too long leads to fatigue and burnout. Many people simply won't function well without enough sleep, and as fatigue sets in, errors increase," he told BI by text. "I believe that Elon's tweet is about an effort, not a new standard at DOGE."

Ginat, who said he regularly works 85 hours a week, added that "my work is on my mind most of my time, and it's an important part of the deal, but great work ideas often come while I hike with my kids."

• Single adults are shifting from dating apps to social media to find partners.
• Instagram is now the top platform for meeting new people, according to data from Rizz.
• Rizz, an AI dating assistant, helps users craft replies and has half a million monthly active users.

Single adults are fed up with dating apps.

They might be turning to old-fashioned social media to find their next partner instead.

Instagram is the most popular place to meet and communicate with a potential partner, at least for the hundreds of thousands of people using Rizz, an AI dating assistant.

Rizz, which is slang for charisma, launched in 2022. It functions like a dating coach, helping users craft witty responses to messages and less cringey pick-up lines.

"Dating coaches charge $30 to $300 an hour. Not everybody can afford paying over $30 an hour. So the moment ChatGPT launched, I already had this idea in the back of my mind," Rizz cofounder and CEO Roman Khaves told Business Insider.

Users upload screenshots of conversations from dating apps, messaging apps, or social media to Rizz, which then generates a response. The app leverages ChatGPT but fine-tunes its responses based on prior responses it generated. So the more you use it, the better and more personalized its responses will be, Khaves said.

Rizz costs $7 a week or $20 a month and has about half a million monthly active users. The platform's user base is 65% male and 35% female and most of them fall between 18 and 35. They're largely from English-speaking countries.

Khaves shared data with BI showing that 22% of the screenshots uploaded to Rizz now come from Instagram, an 8% increase from a year ago. About 15% come from iMessage and 11% from WhatsApp. Dating apps comprise a smaller share, with Tinder at 11%, Hinge at 10%, and Bumble at 4%.

It's not uncommon for potential partners to meet on a dating app and quickly move their conversation to text or even Instagram. But Rizz sees evidence in the data that Instagram is becoming a first-choice destination for dating.

"Instagram has evolved into this fascinating dual-purpose platform for relationships," Khaves said. "Whether it's sliding into DMs or naturally connecting through shared content, people are both starting and deepening their connections entirely within Instagram."

Dating on Instagram isn't new. Celebrity couples — like Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner, or exes Dua Lipa and Anwar Hadid — and regular couples alike have found love on Instagram. The data from Rizz shows it's only becoming more popular as users give up on regular dating apps.

Rizz's algorithms can track the source of screenshots, distinguishing whether a user uploads them from an Instagram story or a direct message. What's less clear is the history behind the relationship. "The one thing we don't know is how long they know the person, whether they've been friends with them on Instagram for a while or not," Khaves said.

Rizz is already developing features tailored to Instagram, where the first move could be linked to a story or a picture rather than a prompt on Hinge. Instagram also introduced a feature in September that allows users to leave comments under stories, making it easier for mutual followers to interact with each other.

The reason people are moving away from dating apps might be simple — they offer too much data about a person upfront.

"Think about it — in real life, you don't walk up to someone with a resume of your height, job, and dating intentions. Instead, you get to know them gradually through shared moments and mutual interests, which is exactly what Instagram enables," Khaves said.

• Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked markets this week after releasing a cheaper rival to OpenAI's o1.
• Silicon Valley has reacted to DeepSeek's release with a mix of panic and awe.
• Some AI startups see an opportunity in DeepSeek's open-source success.

In the tech industry, the tides can turn quickly, especially when it comes to AI.

Last week, OpenAI was the industry leader, developing what many saw as the most advanced AI models on the market, which led to a skyrocketing valuation.

This week, its standing was in question as Silicon Valley eyed a more cost-effective competitor: DeepSeek.

The Chinese company recently released a challenger to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model called R1. Users who've tested both said R1 rivals the capabilities of o1 and comes at a substantially cheaper cost.

The news shocked markets on Monday, leading to a stock sell-off that wiped almost $1 trillion in market cap. AI insiders said the frenzy is warranted: DeepSeek's methods are a game changer for the industry.

CEOs of startup companies facilitating the AI boom by supplying hardware, security services, and building agents told Business Insider that DeepSeek's success creates more opportunities for smaller companies to flourish.

Roi Ginat, the cofounder and CEO of EndlessAI, which develops the video AI assistant Lloyd, said DeepSeek's success could widen the pool of who can develop AI technology — and who can access it.

"DeepSeek's success represents a democratization of AI development, where smaller teams with limited resources can meaningfully compete with well-funded tech giants," Ginat wrote by email. "This has catalyzed a wave of innovation from startups and research labs previously considered peripheral to the field."

While OpenAI might not lose its standing in the industry, Ginat said its role could change. "The industry is witnessing a fascinating tension between two competing visions. One focuses on pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) through increasingly powerful and comprehensive models. The other emphasizes practical applications through efficient models and methods targeted at specific use cases and benchmarks," he said, comparing OpenAI and DeepSeek. "This tension drives innovation in both directions, and also exists within the big companies."

Pukar Hamal, the CEO of SecurityPal, which helps companies like OpenAI complete security questionnaires, said the industry should temper expectations of immediate change.

"If the DeepSeek team truly can cut training and inference costs by an order of magnitude, it could spark far broader deployment of AI than analysts anticipate," Hamal, told Business Insider. "On the flip side, it'll take more than a few tough earnings calls to make the biggest AI players reconsider the staggering GPU investments we're seeing for 2025."

Meta recently committed $60 billion to AI infrastructure investments. President Donald Trump also announced Stargate last month, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that will invest $500 billion into AI infrastructure across the country.

One of the biggest debates among AI innovators is whether open-source models, which the public can access and modify, are more likely to drive breakthroughs than closed-source models. OpenAI says it keeps its models closed for safety, while DeepSeek's models are open-source.

Satya Nitta, the cofounder and CEO of Emergence AI, a company developing AI agents, said that "DeepSeek R1 is a meaningful advance in broadening access to AI reasoning, spotlighting the power of open source and setting a new benchmark for reasoning."

Hamal said we should still approach open-source development cautiously — even if it'll eventually dominate the industry.

"An 'open source' model of unknown alignment invites serious public safety and regulatory questions. If DeepSeek's mobile app keeps climbing the charts, we could end up with a discussion similar to the recent calls to block TikTok in the US," he said. White House advisor David Sacks also raised concerns about DeepSeek's training methods when he told Fox News that it is 'possible' DeepSeek used OpenAI's models to train its own AI model.

Still, "openness typically wins in the long run," Hamal said. "If DeepSeek helps reset an increasingly closed foundational model market, that can be a net positive — so long as we maintain the guardrails that protect customers and the public at large."

If there's one lesson AI executives are taking away from this week, though, it's that it's possible to do more with fewer resources.

Matthew Putman, CEO of Nanotronics, which designs AI-controlled factories, said, "To me, the competition itself is less significant than the validation of a broader principle: AI models can be built more affordably and applied far beyond large language models."

• DeepSeek's success has put Silicon Valley on edge about Chinese competition.
• After DeepSeek released its latest model, AI investors panicked.
• Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said the market's reaction to DeepSeek was "unjustified."

Silicon Valley is melting down over DeepSeek, an emerging Chinese competitor in AI, but Meta's AI chief says the hysteria is unwarranted.

DeepSeek caused alarm among US AI companies when it released a model last week that, on third-party benchmarks, outperformed models from OpenAI, Meta, and other leading developers. It did so with subpar chips and, it said, vastly less money.

Bernstein Research found that DeepSeek priced its models significantly below equivalent models from OpenAI: DeepSeek's latest reasoning model, R1, cost $0.55 for every 1 million tokens inputted, while OpenAI's o1 reasoning model charged $15 for the same number of tokens. A token is the smallest unit of data an AI model processes.

The news hit the markets Monday, triggering a tech sell-off that wiped out $1 trillion in market cap. Nvidia — known for its premium chips, which can cost at least $30,000 — lost almost $600 billion.

Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist for Facebook AI Research, however, says there's a "major misunderstanding" about how the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI will be used. In a Threads post, LeCun said the huge sums of money going into US AI companies were needed primarily for inference, not training AI.

Inference is the process in which AI models apply their training knowledge to new data. It's how popular generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT respond to user requests. More user requests means more inference is required, and processing costs increase.

LeCun said that as AI tools become more sophisticated, the cost of inference will rise. "Once you put video understanding, reasoning, large-scale memory, and other capabilities in AI systems, inference costs are going to increase," LeCun said, adding, "So, the market reactions to DeepSeek are woefully unjustified."

Thomas Sohmers, a founder of Positron, a hardware startup for transformer model inference, told Business Insider he agreed with LeCun that inference would account for a larger share of AI infrastructure costs.

"Inference demand and the infrastructure spend for it is going to rise rapidly," he said. "Everyone looking at DeepSeek's training cost improvements and not seeing that is going to insanely drive inference demand, cost, and spend is missing the forest for the trees."

This means that, as its popularity grows, DeepSeek is expected to handle more requests and spend a significant amount on inference.

A growing number of startups are entering the AI inference market, aiming to simplify output generation. With so many providers, some in the AI industry expect the cost of inference to drop eventually.

But this applies only to systems handling inference on a small scale. The Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has said that for models like DeepSeek V3 that provide free answers to a large user base, inference costs are likely to be much higher.

"Frontier model AI inference is only expensive at the scale of large-scale free B2C services (like customer service bots)," Mollick wrote on X in May. "For internal business use, like giving action items after a meeting or providing a first draft of an analysis, the cost of a query is often extremely cheap."

In the past two weeks, leading tech firms have stepped up their investments in AI infrastructure.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced more than $60 billion in planned capital expenditures for 2025 as the company ramps up its own AI infrastructure. In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg said the company would be "growing our AI teams significantly" and had "the capital to continue investing in the years ahead." He did not say how much of that would be devoted to inference.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank set to funnel up to $500 billion into AI infrastructure across the US.

• Business leaders are reacting to DeepSeek's rise, which sent US tech stocks tumbling.
• Intel's former CEO said DeepSeek would expand the AI market instead of diminishing it.
• Meta promised a new "leading state of the art" AI model and pledged more investment.

Tech leaders and their companies have reacted with admiration and insights after AI company DeepSeek launched its flagship large language model, R1.

Just days after DeepSeek launched, the app dethroned ChatGPT with the most downloads on Apple's Top Free Apps chart, rivaling systems by OpenAI, Google, and Meta despite being developed at what the startup said was a fraction of the cost.

The rise of the Chinese AI startup founded by quant hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng was followed by a sharp sell-off of major AI and chip companies in the US tech markets on Monday.

Nvidia, a leader in AI hardware, saw its stock plunge by over 17% — erasing hundreds of billions from its market cap — amid concern about DeepSeek's ability to achieve competitive results with less advanced and significantly cheaper hardware.

Here's how Silicon Valley leaders have responded to DeepSeek so far.

Satya Nadella

Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, posted on LinkedIn on Monday that "Jevons paradox is at play again," referencing the concept that greater efficiency in production often fuels higher demand. "As AI becomes more efficient and accessible, its adoption will soar, transforming it into an indispensable commodity," he added.

Earlier last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Nadella also said that other tech companies "should take the developments out of China very, very seriously."

Marc Andreessen

Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, praised DeepSeek's R1 model and called it "one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs" and "a profound gift to the world" in an X post on Friday. On Sunday, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist — who has been advising President Trump on tech policy — went on to call Deepseek R1 "AI's Sputnik moment."

Pat Gelsinger

Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel, challenged the market's reaction to DeepSeek's advancements, particularly the sell-off of AI chip stocks. He said the market is "getting it wrong" and suggested that the company's "dramatically cheaper" AI models could expand the market for AI applications rather than diminish it.

Gelsinger also credited DeepSeek's Chinese engineers, who "had limited resources, and they had to find creative solutions."

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist for Meta's Fundamental AI Research division, challenged the perception that China is surpassing the US in AI in a LinkedIn post, arguing that the correct reading is that "open source models are surpassing proprietary ones."

He said that DeepSeek "came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people's work." He also said the hype around DeepSeek's drastically cheaper models is a bit overblown.

In a Threads post, LeCun said there is a "major misunderstanding about AI infrastructure investments," noting that the billions of dollars in investment are largely going toward inference, not training AI.

Inference is the process in which AI models apply their training knowledge to new data. It's how popular generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT respond to user requests. So the more user requests a model receives, the higher the cost to process inference.

LeCun said that as tools become more sophisticated, the cost of processing costs will rise, too.

"Once you put video understanding, reasoning, large-scale memory, and other capabilities in AI systems, inference costs are going to increase," LeCun said. "So, the market reactions to DeepSeek are woefully unjustified."

Mark Zuckerberg

Though Zuckerberg did not directly respond to DeepSeek's rise, the Meta CEO posted on Facebook on Friday promising that a new version of Facebook's open-source AI model family Llama would become "the leading state of the art model" upon release.

Llama is an AI model designed for natural language processing tasks like text generation, translation, and summarization, which is promoted as open-source like DeepSeek.

Pledging more than 1.3 million GPUs of computing power by the end of the year, he wrote that Meta is "planning to invest $60-65B in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly" and that the company has additional capital to continue investing over the next few years.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia

In a statement, a spokesperson for Nvidia told Business Insider that DeepSeek is an "excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling," illustrating how to leverage "widely available models and compute that is fully export control compliant." The spokesperson added that to make inference work, it "requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking."

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, has not directly responded to DeepSeek thus far.

Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X on Monday that DeepSeek's R1 model is "impressive," especially because of its price point.

The Chinese AI lab recently rolled out new models that researchers say are just as good as OpenAI's 01 model.

Altman embraced the new competition and said OpenAI will continue to deliver better models. The CEO said "more compute is more important now than ever to succeed" and said he is looking forward to bringing "AGI and beyond" to the world.

"We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases," the OpenAI boss added.

• Consultant starting salaries have remained flat since 2023, a new report found.
• Management Consulted found salaries were largely stagnant at boutique, MBB, and Big Four firms.
• The industry has been impacted recently by slowing demand and AI-fueled productivity increases.

Starting salaries for consultants at both top firms and boutique consultancies largely remained flat for the second year in a row, according to a new report from Management Consulted, a company that provides online resources and career coaching to professionals trying to land jobs in consulting.

The report found that starting pay has remained stagnant since 2023 as the consulting industry reels from a slowdown in demand for services, despite some recent signs of improvement. Previously, annual increases of 5 to 10% were standard for the industry, according to Management Consulted.

The company's 2025 Consulting Salaries Report included over 100 firms and was based on submissions and offer letters shared by its readers and clients who work in consulting. Management Consulted said it does not include salary information that it is unable to verify.

The report found that starting total compensation at the Big Four professional services firms — Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and EY — has not increased since 2023. This was true for new hires coming out of undergraduate programs as well as the higher paid ones coming out of MBAs or PhDs.

The same was largely true for new hires at MBB firms — McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group — which are widely considered the most prestigious strategy consulting firms and are known for their competitive pay packages.

Do you work in consulting and have insights to share about the industry? Contact this reporter at [email protected] or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at kelseyv.21.

The report said that Management Consulted expected salaries to remain flat despite some increases in demand for consulting services in 2024, which came after a couple years of a downturn that saw major firms conducting layoffs or delaying start dates for new hires.

The plateau is notable given that consulting compensation surged in 2022 and 2023, according to Management Consulted's 2023 salary trends video. The last major increase before that was in 2019.

In 2023 post-MBA hires earned a base salary of $192,000, a performance bonus of up to $60,000, and a signing bonus of $35,000 at the top tiers. Pre-MBA hires earned a base salary of $112,000, a performance bonus of up to $30,000, and a signing bonus of around $5,000.

However, salaries and performance bonuses rose across the industry in 2023, with several firms enhancing benefits like profit-sharing, paid leave, and retirement contributions. Boston Consulting Group even overhauled its compensation structure in a bid to attract new talent and retain existing talent.

One reason salaries remained the same in 2024, according to the report, is productivity advancements sparked by generative AI and remote work. The report also said fewer consultants were leaving the industry due to limited opportunities elsewhere, meaning the stagnant salaries could be another potential side effect of the so-called white-collar recession.

"AI enablement is enabling consulting firms to accomplish more with fewer hires. Productivity gains, combined with slower attrition, reduce the need for new hires and stall salary growth," Namaan Mian, chief operating officer of Management Consulted, said in comments shared with Business Insider.

Mian also said the perception of the value of hiring MBAs, who typically make a higher starting salary than consultants coming out of undergrad, varies widely.

"Firms historically pay MBAs twice as much, but don't get twice the value from them. This doesn't fly in an efficiency oriented environment," Mian said. "This is why we're seeing less hiring from MBA programs and more from undergraduate ones."

Some firms also used changes in their variable compensation — in which pay is partially determined by performance via bonuses — to make their pay packages look more attractive, the report said, adding that only 5 to 10% of consultants typically earn the maximum amount of their bonus.

Management Consulted said it expects an increase in hiring as demand for consulting services and attrition are expected to increase in the coming years. However, it said salaries for new hires could remain stagnant.

Do you work in consulting and have insights to share about the industry? Contact this reporter at [email protected] or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at lvaranasi.70.

• Lambda Labs COO Mitesh Agrawal has left to head AI hardware startup Positron.
• Lambda focuses on deploying cloud infrastructure to customers and is valued at over $2 billion.
• Positron aims to compete with Nvidia by offering faster, energy-efficient AI hardware.

Lambda Labs, a Nvidia partner, has lost its chief operating officer to a little-known company building hardware for the AI industry.

Lambda COO Mitesh Agrawal told Business Insider he stepped into a new role as CEO of Positron earlier this month. Positron builds hardware for transformer model inference, which is how chatbots like ChatGPT respond to user requests.

Agrawal's departure is significant given his role in shaping Lambda into one of Silicon Valley's best-funded and most valuable startups.

During its Series C round last February, the company was valued at about $1.5 billion. Agrawal declined to share the company's exact valuation but said it has grown to over $2 billion since then.

Agrawal told BI that when he joined Lambda in 2017, the company was focused on building machines for image generation models. This was five years after twin brothers Stephen and Michael Balaban founded it as a company developing facial recognition technology. It wasn't long after Agrawal's arrival, however, that the company shifted its focus, designing infrastructure for full-scale data centers and pivoting into cloud services.

He said Lambda's business now focuses on deploying cloud infrastructure to customers, renting out servers powered by Nvidia's graphics processing units. It also offers the requisite software, including APIs for inference and machine learning libraries for customers.

Agrawal said that his move to Positron comes amid a growing appetite for inference — the capacity for AI models to apply their training to new data.

Between chatbots like ChatGPT and xAI's Grok, and new reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 tackling PhD-level problems, "the curve of technology for inference is just going up, which means the computational requirement is really going up," Agrawal said. So, he said he's thinking a lot about "how to solve and how to run these models with as much efficiency as possible."

He believes Positron is well-positioned to take on that challenge.

Positron was founded in 2023 by Thomas Sohmers, whom Agrawal met in 2015. The two also overlapped at Lambda during Sohmers's stint at the company between 2020 and 2021. Sohmers, who will move into the role of chief technology officer, told BI that, in simplest terms, the company is "building hardware competing against Nvidia."

Positron says its hardware outperforms Nvidia's H100 and H200 GPUs — which fueled the AI race before it released its more powerful Blackwell chips — in performance, power, and affordability.

Going up against a behemoth like Nvidia — which overtook Apple as the world's most valuable company last week — is no easy task for an up-and-coming company. But by focusing more narrowly on providing hardware for transformer model inference, Sohmers said Positron can differentiate itself from the competition.

Transformer models — neural networks that learn the context and meaning of data to generate new data — are behind some of the most popular generative AI applications. Unlike convolutional neural networks, which underpinned previous decades of machine learning advances, transformer models have greater memory demands. Sohmers said he saw an opportunity to capitalize on those demands.

"I would say the whole reason we started Positron is we thought that there was a better way to do things," Sohmers said. "Nvidia, as a large company that also has a lot of other product focuses wasn't going to really optimize and focus on the particular niche that we're focused on, which is transformer model inference."

Agrawal, too, is confident in the performance and energy efficiency of Positron's hardware. Its compatibility with a range of transformer models will also help it attract customers from competitors, he said.

"Nvidia has such a strong ecosystem in the world of AI models. You hear about their CUDA moat, and you heard about the software moat," he said, referring to the software network the company has built between its products to retain customers.

"What Positron really did was completely remove this friction of anything," Agrawal said. That means a company can take a model trained on an Nvidia GPU and "run that model's inference on a Positron card just like you would run on an Nvidia GPU," he said.

Agrawal said the jump from an established player like Lambda to a young startup like Positron presents an "exciting challenge."

"You get to compete against an industry veteran as well as in a field that is just so big," he said.

• Over three-fifths of US workers have nightmares about work.
• Common nightmares include being late to work, job loss, and romantic dreams about coworkers.
• Dreams are often a reflection of the inner self, therapists say.

For many people, work extends well beyond the standard 9-to-5. The pressure from their jobs can disrupt sleep, leading to restless nights and stressful dreams.

In a survey of 1,750 working adults in the US conducted by Each Night, a sleep resource platform, more than three-fifths of workers reported having a nightmare about their jobs.

The most common workplace nightmare is being late to work, according to an analysis of global search data conducted by the job search platform JobLeads. Losing your job, getting a new job, and colleague romances were also commonly reported dreams.

Annie Wright, a psychotherapist who operates boutique trauma therapy centers in California and Florida, told Business Insider that dreams are worth analyzing.

The fear of being late to work can signify a sense of uncertainty, she said. "It doesn't terribly surprise me that that's showing up because, you know, we have that classic dream in college and high school of being late for a test," she said.

Through the lens of gestalt psychotherapy — a therapeutic approach that focuses on understanding a person's present experience — every element of a dream, from the setting to the people, places, and objects, can be viewed as a reflection of the dreamer's inner self.

Wright offered a hypothetical workplace dream in which the dreamer sees their boss, closest colleague, and a challenging client. The boss is yelling at the colleague about their interactions with the client.

Wright said she would ask the dreamer to describe the qualities they associate with their boss. "Critical, demanding, and hostile," they might say, she said. Then, they would describe their colleague. "Supportive, kind, but incompetent sometimes," she said.

She would ask the dreamer to think about all these aspects within their self.

"What does it say that the critical, angry part of you is attacking the, you know, supportive but kind part of you," she said. Perhaps the person would realize that the dream was about something else entirely.

"I cannot turn off this critical voice about my inability to get pregnant," she said, as an example. "When we unfold it from that lens, it can become less about the workplace itself or the workplace figure itself and more about what those different parts symbolized by the workplace or workplace figures represent."

Stressful dreams often reflect a person's sense of vulnerability in the wider world, she said. Whether it's the workplace or the middle school hallway — the most common setting for a stress dream — the setting of a dream is like a subject that our mental state seeks out. "In other words, the state of vulnerability seeks that out and gloms on to it," she said.

Here's a closer look at the top most searched workplace stress dreams, according to JobLeads data.

• DeepSeek, an open-source Chinese AI company, has riled Silicon Valley with its rapid rise.
• Meta's chief AI scientist said DeepSeek has benefited from the open-source community.
• Meta's AI program has remained open-source, while OpenAI has shifted to closed-source.

Silicon Valley was on edge this week after DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, released its R1 model. In third-party benchmarks, it outperformed leading American AI companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic.

For Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, the biggest takeaway from DeepSeek's success was not the heightened threat posed by Chinese competition but the value of keeping AI models open source so that anyone can benefit.

It's not that China's AI is "surpassing the US," but rather that "open source models are surpassing proprietary ones," LeCun said in a post on Threads.

DeepSeek's R1 is itself open source, as is Meta's Llama. OpenAI, which was originally founded as an open-source AI company with a mission to create technology that benefits all of humanity, has on the other hand more recently shifted to closed-source.

LeCun said DeepSeek has "profited from open research and open source."

"They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people's work. Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it," LeCun said. "That is the power of open research and open source."

When DeepSeek unveiled R1 on January 20, which it said "demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities," the company said it was "pushing the boundaries" of open-source AI.

The announcement took Silicon Valley by surprise and was easily the most talked-about development in the tech industry during a week that included the World Economic Forum, TikTok uncertainty, and President Donald Trump's busy first few days in office.

Days after DeepSeek's announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta planned to spend over $60 billion in 2025 as it doubles down on AI. Zuckerberg has been an outspoken advocate of open-source models.

"Part of my goal for the next 10-15 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win," he said in September. "I think that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry."

Those who support open source say it allows technology to develop rapidly and democratically since anyone can modify and redistribute the code. On the other hand, advocates for closed-source models argue that they are more secure because the code is kept private.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the closed-source approach offers his company "an easier way to hit the safety threshold" in an AMA on Reddit last November. He added, however, that he "would like us to open source more stuff in the future."

• OpenAI unveiled Operator, its first AI agent, for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the US.
• It can autonomously complete tasks like booking reservations or buying groceries.
• The agent is powered by a new model built in GPT-4o called CUA.

Experts predicted that 2025 would be the year AI agents go mainstream, and OpenAI is delivering on that forecast.

On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled Operator, a system that can use a web browser to do things like book travel reservations and buy products.

While chatbots like OpenAI's popular ChatGPT use generative AI to respond to queries, Operator is an agent designed to perform tasks autonomously.

OpenAI said Operator would be available Thursday in the US for users of ChatGPT Pro, a $200 monthly plan that provides access to its latest models, including o1. In the coming months, the company said, it will also be made available to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI's $20 monthly subscription tier, and to users in other countries.

During a livestream announcing Operator on Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the release an "early research preview," adding that it would be refined over the coming months. He said OpenAI would also have more agents to launch.

The interface is similar to ChatGPT. Users prompt Operator with a request, like "book a dinner reservation at 7 p.m." They can select a specific website through which they want to process the request, such as OpenTable, or send the request through a search engine like Google.

Operator summarizes its reasoning process in a sidebar so users can identify steps where it makes mistakes, which OpenAI says it's still prone to do.

Users can also upload a picture of a handwritten grocery list and prompt Operator to purchase the items on the list.

Users can choose a specific site, such as Instacart, for Operator to purchase the groceries from. If no site is selected, it will default to a search engine.

Reiichiro Nakano, a member of the company's technical staff, said in the livestream that Operator was powered by CUA, a new model built on GPT-4o.

It's "trained to use and control a computer in the same way that humans can, by just looking at the screen and using a mouse and keyboard to control it," he said.

Nakano said the model bypassed the need for APIs, mechanisms that allow software components to communicate with each other, and "unlocks a whole new range of software we can use that was previously inaccessible."

He added that the model removed "one more bottleneck in our path towards AGI," or artificial general intelligence.

Still, Operator has a way to go before it matches humans' ability to navigate the web.

OpenAI said that in a benchmark measuring how AI agents navigate common operating systems, like the open-source operating system Linux, Operator scored 38.1%, compared with 72.4% for humans. In another benchmark measuring how AI agents navigate common websites, Operator scored 58.1%, compared with 78.2% for humans.

• McKinsey executive Matthew Fitzpatrick is leaving the firm to become CEO of Invisible Technologies.
• Fitzpatrick led QuantumBlack Labs, developing AI software and tools for companies.
• Invisible Technologies, a company focused on AI training, is valued at $500M, the company said.

One of McKinsey & Company's top executives is leaving the firm for Silicon Valley's new promised land: the AI industry.

After 12 years at McKinsey, Matthew Fitzpatrick, senior partner and global head of QuantumBlack Labs — the software and research and development arm of the firm's AI division QuantumBlack— is stepping down.

During his tenure, Fitzpatrick led teams that helped companies scale AI projects and oversaw the development of tools like Kedro, an open-source analytics and machine learning library that McKinsey said has been downloaded more than 17 million times since its launch in 2019.

In his next role, he will serve as the CEO of Invisible Technologies, a key company in the AI industry that has kept a relatively low profile.

Invisible Technologies specializes in data pre-training, the initial phase of training for large language model developers, and post-training, which helps refine models for companies adopting the technology. Invisible Technologies was valued at $500 million in 2024, according to a press release from the company.

Fitzpatrick said he believes Invisible can help businesses tackle one of the biggest challenges of the moment — effectively integrating AI into their operations.

"Despite the hype around AI, we're at a point where fewer than 10% of AI models reach usage and production because enterprises don't have the experience to evaluate, train, and operationalize them," Fitzpatrick said in the company's press release. "That's where Invisible shines. I'm bullish we can help customers cross the chasm and realize the massive potential of AI."

Fitzpatrick told BI the move came about through conversations with Invisible's founder, Francis Pedraza, whom he met through a networking organization.

"It's the most under-the-radar critical AI company in the US that I've ever seen, and it's been involved in all of the model training for the last five years but has done very little publicity of any kind around that," he said.

He said he sees companies having a strong demand for Invisible's services. The challenge, however, is "not growing too fast that we in any way sacrifice quality," he said.

Somesh Khanna, a former colleague of Fitzpatrick's, told BI Fitzpatrick built a reputation for changing McKinsey's talent pool, bringing more engineers and employees with quantitative skills into the fold. McKinsey told BI that it now employs 7,000 people as technologists, designers, and product managers. Fitzpatrick was responsible for overseeing 1,000 of them, a rep for Fitzpatrick told BI.

"The biggest thing is that in the McKinsey model of the past it was very hard for atypical profiles such as PhDs or data engineers or scientists to integrate into the culture of the firm. McKinsey's philosophy centered around acquiring amazing talent and teaching these individuals the McKinsey approach to problem-solving and client service," Khanna, a senior partner who retired from the firm in May after almost three decades, told BI.

"These guys, the new team that Matt was hiring and developing, were even more different — people who basically were hands-on keyboards guys, not power pointers."

Khanna said Fitzpatrick was critical in integrating this new breed of talent with deep technical skills into the firm.

Fitzpatrick will be succeeded at QuantumBlack Labs by McKinsey senior partner Tomás Lajous.

• TikTok restored services in the US after 12 hours of downtime, easing some creators' concerns.
• Creators rely on TikTok for income, from product sales and ad deals to the app's affiliate program.
• With TikTok's future still uncertain, some creators are planning to diversify how they sell online.

TikTok restored services in the US on Sunday, easing the concerns of content creators and entrepreneurs who make their living from the platform — at least for now.

The platform was down for 12 hours starting late Saturday night and was restored following a Truth Social post by President-Elect Donald Trump, who said he'd issue an executive order on Monday to delay the ban. TikTok's future remains unclear, as its China-based parent company, ByteDance, has so far refused to divest from the app as required by law, but for now, the economy driven by TikTok can continue to churn.

"My whole livelihood was on the line this weekend," Live shopping host Kimberly Balance told Business Insider. "Never experienced anything like this the entire time that I've been a business owner."

Balance, who goes by KIMMIEBBAGS, sells luxury consignment goods on TikTok, Instagram, and the marketplace platform Whatnot. Last week, she relocated her business from Florida to California to expand her live shopping operations.

Balance was set to host a six-hour live shopping show on TikTok on Saturday as part of a new live shopping partnership she had struck with Reunited Luxury. On Thursday evening, TikTok informed her that her Friday meeting with the platform's luxury sales manager was canceled. Her show on Saturday was canceled soon after, in a blow to her business' revenue.

Since it launched in 2023, TikTok's online marketplace, TikTok Shop, has quickly become a prime source of revenue for creators on the platform. The app also has an affiliate program where creators can earn a commission for sales they help drive by tagging products in videos or live streams. Creators can also package products from different sellers on their profiles for users to search through. TikTok takes a cut of each transaction.

In its April 2024 economic impact report, the company said TikTok "brings tens of billions of dollars to the US economy," including $15 billion in revenue to small businesses that use the app, supporting more than 224,000 jobs. Business Insider could not independently confirm these internal statistics.

Before TikTok "went dark" on Saturday night, some creators on the platform told Business Insider they worried the ban could hurt them financially.

In a press release for the social media app Own, one creator, ChalkDunny, said he made more than 60% of his income in 2024. Another creator, izzybizzyspider, said in the release that TikTok is her "biggest source of income and biggest platform."

She warned that creators on the app have to be "prepared to be flexible and adapt quickly."

Nadya Okamoto, founder of menstrual-care brand August, which sells products on TikTok, told Business Insider she is "relieved" that TikTok came back online. However, she said the ongoing volatility over the ban prompted her to develop a contingency plan that reduces her reliance on the app.

"I've been encouraging my followers to connect with me on platforms like Instagram and YouTube for updates," she said. "I'm also exploring other affiliate shopping opportunities, such as YouTube Shop, where I've started adding shoppable products—particularly in my skincare-related videos."

Balance said she plans to switch up the platforms where she does business, given TikTok's still-uncertain future.

"We're going to continue probably to lean on the other channels like Instagram and possibly launch a YouTube," she said. "I think this is just an eye opener for all small businesses that we need to have a diverse way to reach our audiences."

TikTok did not immediately return a request for comment from Business Insider for this story.

• Consultants told BI that finding a "sponsor" is the key to career advancement at top firms.
• Sponsors offer seniority and influence to help employees succeed.
• Consultants say mentorship is insufficient and that sponsors are key for promotions.

Climbing the ranks at a top-tier consulting firm is often harder than landing the job itself.

Several current and former consultants told Business Insider that having the right sponsor — an executive who champions their success — is crucial early on.

McKinsey & Company defines sponsors as high-ranking employees who "offer seniority, power, and influence to help you meet your goals." They differ from formally assigned mentors, who assist with annual reviews, guidance, and emotional support. Instead, sponsor relationships are formed through more organic connections with employees.

"99% of it is unofficial, and it's about finding people that you want to help basically," said Matthew Fitzpatrick, a senior partner at McKinsey and global leader of the firm's AI division, QuantumBlack Labs. Fitzpatrick has sponsored hundreds of employees during his 12-year tenure at the firm and said it's "probably the most fun part of my job."

His advice to younger employees is to seek sponsors who share their interests.

"All good mentor and sponsorship relationships are built around really shared interests and passions for things," he said. "I think the relationships I formed over the last decade were people that were really interested in the same things I am."

Former McKinsey consultants say advancing at the firm is tough without a sponsor. "Sponsors are extremely important, especially if you are looking for your next promotion," an associate who left last April told Business Insider by text. "They can certainly make your career if you have strong sponsors and a lack of a strong sponsor makes it difficult to survive."

Many consultants work on a project-to-project basis, and sponsors can also help new hires secure projects that build their reputation within the firm.

"My first six to seven months when I was a brand new analyst at Accenture, it was just really tough to get onto high-quality projects, and I felt totally lost, even though I was assigned a career counselor," a former Accenture consultant, who requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing career prospects, said.

She had a breakthrough when a senior consultant at the firm recognized her potential and put her on his next project, which offered the kind of visibility she needed to advance her career at the firm.

"Literally because of him, one good project led to another one," she said. "He became my biggest advocate in terms of being not only a sponsor for promotions but also a mentor for coaching me on the day-to-day." Eventually, he became her direct manager, too.

Many top consulting firms have various types of corporate mentorship programs, which are different from sponsors. These programs offer employees one-on-one guidance with senior-level executives. Some pair employees from different generations or demographic backgrounds.

However, consultants say that mentorship alone can't fill the gap between success and failure at a firm.

The former Accenture consultant stayed at the firm for four years due to the support of her boss.

"Beyond the formal boss and employee relationship, he also made an extra effort to both mentor me and be my advocate," she said, noting that the distinction is important. "I think that people need individuals who are in both camps. Sometimes, you can't get both in one person."

• Nate Anderson said he's disbanding Hindenburg Research after completing all its outstanding projects.
• Hindenburg, a short-seller founded in 2017, gained fame for its forensic financial research.
• The firm impacted major companies and plans to share its tactics publicly.

Nate Anderson, founder of the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research, is tapping out.

On Wednesday, Anderson wrote in a post titled "Gratitude" on the firm's website, "I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research. The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on," including reporting multiple cases to regulators.

"Building this has been a life's dream." But, he said, "the intensity and focus has come at the cost of missing a lot of the rest of the world and the people I care about."

Anderson launched Hindenburg in 2017 and rose to prominence in 2020 with a report saying that electric truck manufacturer Nikola Corporation had exaggerated and misrepresented its products to investors. The stock tumbled 11% in a single day, and Anderson was off to the races.

Other targets of Hindenburg's negative research and short-seller activity included Clover Health, Adani Group, and Icahn Enterprises. In each instance the entity in question saw sharp stock losses immediately after publication. The Adani Group situation was especially notable, because the market reaction to the firm's research resulted in tens of billions of dollars of lost net worth for one of Asia's richest individuals.

Unlike typical investors that seek to capture returns from rising stock prices, short-sellers bet on declines. Hindenburg carved a niche for itself by publishing negative research, often focused on highlighting what it argued to be fraudulent or misleading corporate behavior, while also positioning itself short beforehand. It's unknown how much money the firm brought in overall from its short bets.

Anderson said in his message that the firm's work held some of the most powerful companies accountable for their actions.

"Nearly 100 individuals have been charged civilly or criminally by regulators at least in part through our work, including billionaires and oligarchs. We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking," he wrote.

In the next six months, Anderson wrote that he plans to make the firm's tactics public through open-source materials and videos on their investigation process.

Anderson and representatives from Hindenburg didn't immediately respond to BI's request for comment.

• Jamie Dimon urges incoming president Donald Trump to prioritize immigration policy in his second term.
• Trump has said he plans to conduct mass deportation in his second term.
• Dimon also advocates for education reform and doubling the earned income tax credit.

With Donald Trump set to take office in about a week, top Wall Street leaders are coming forward with advice.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon honed in on immigration policy when asked what advice he'd give Trump for his second presidential term in a CBS News interview posted Sunday. "Get immigration, border security right," he said. "Then proper immigration after that."

Since his debut on the political stage, Trump has been outspoken about immigration policy. On the campaign trail last year Trump said he would carry out the "largest domestic deportation in American history." He also plans to end birthright citizenship, build new ICE detention centers, and reinstate his first-term policies. During his first term in office, he curtailed legal immigration rates, signed an executive order that suspended several types of work visas, including H-1B visas, which are crucial for the tech industry, and completed hundreds of miles of construction on a border wall between the US and Mexico.

Dimon says he agrees with Trump's big-picture view on immigration. "You could talk about specifics and disagree, but the concern around border security, obviously, every country in the world is concerned about that," he said.

Beyond immigration, Dimon says he wants to see changes to our education system. "I would love to see high schools, community colleges, and colleges measured on what is the outcome of the kid being educated. Like do they get a job that's well paying, not do they do math well," he said. "I believe that would put a lot more pressure on schools to teach skills that can give you really good paying jobs." That includes jobs in fields like data analytics, manufacturing, nursing, compliance, and financial skills, he said.

He's also in favor of eliminating tax breaks, even for the wealthy. He proposed doubling the earned income tax credit: a refundable tax credit for low to moderate-income workers, particularly those with children. "That alone would put a lot more money into the pockets of people who are working who are lower income, it would go into their communities, into their families," he said.

• Mark Zuckerberg explained why Meta is replacing fact-checkers on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
• He said the change aims to address ideological censorship concerns and enhance user voice.
• Critics argue the move is a setback for accuracy.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his rationale for changing the company's content moderation policies during Friday's episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Earlier, on Tuesday, Zuckerberg posted a video message to Meta's blog announcing that he would replace fact-checkers with community notes, a system similar to what Elon Musk uses on X.

The announcement was criticized by dozens of third-party fact-checking groups, which signed an open letter to Zuckerberg denouncing the changes as a "step backward" for accuracy.

Zuckerberg told Rogan his reason for the changes was "censorship."

"You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice," he said. "It goes back to our original mission, it's just give people the power to share and make people more open and connected."

Zuckerberg said that over the past 10 years, there's been a greater push for "idealogical-based censorship" on the platform, fueled especially by the 2016 election, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic. "We just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds," he said.

Zuckerberg initially gave into the pressure, believing it stemmed from genuine concerns about misinformation. After the 2016 election, he implemented a system of third-party fact-checkers tasked with correcting statements like "the earth is flat." However, the system quickly veered into gray areas, leading to accusations that the company's moderators were biased.

Pressure on Meta's content moderation policies continued, reaching a fever pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Biden administration rolled out its vaccine program. "While they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it," Zuckerberg said. "They pushed us super hard to take down things that were, honestly, were true."

That means he has been considering changing Meta's content moderation policies for a while now.

"I think that this is going to be pretty durable because, at this point, we've just been pressure tested on this stuff for the last 8 to 10 years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us," he said. "I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward."

• Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will start automating the work of midlevel software engineers this year.
• Meta may eventually outsource all coding on its apps to AI.
• Meta also plans to replace fact-checkers with community notes and reduce DEI initiatives.

This year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated.

Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday.

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code."

It may initially be an expensive endeavor, but Zuckerberg said Meta will reach the point where all of the code in its apps and the AI it generates will also be done by AI. According to a salary tracking site, midlevel software engineers at the company now earn close to mid-six figures in total compensation.

Zuckerberg's interview with Rogan came after a big week of changes for the company.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta plans to replace third-party fact-checkers with community notes, similar to Elon Musk's X, and bring back more political content. The announcement has elicited alarm from dozens of fact-checking groups, who signed an open letter to Zuckerberg saying the changes would be "a step backward" for the company.

Meta is also planning to roll back several of its DEI initiatives. In a memo sent to staff on Meta's internal communications platform, Workplace, its vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, wrote, "We will no longer have a team focused on DEI."

• Enterprise AI startup Cohere has launched a new platform called North.
• North allows users to quickly deploy AI agents to execute tasks across various business sectors.
• The company says the platform cuts the time it takes to complete a task by over five-fold.

2025 is shaping up to be the year that AI "agents" go mainstream.

Unlike AI-based chatbots that respond to user queries, agents are AI tools that work autonomously. They can execute tasks and make decisions, and companies are already using them for everything from creating marketing campaigns to recruiting new employees.

Cohere, an AI startup focused on enterprise technology, unveiled North on Thursday — an all-in-one platform combining large language models, multimodal search, and agents to help its customers work more efficiently with AI.

Through North, users can quickly customize and deploy AI agents to find relevant information, conduct research, and execute tasks across various business functions.

The platform could make it easier for a company's finance team, for example, to quickly search through internal data sources and create reports. Its multimodal search function could also help extract information from everything from images to slides to spreadsheets.

AI agents built with North integrate with a company's existing workplace tools and applications. The platform can run in private, allowing organizations to integrate all their sensitive data in one place securely.

"North allows employees to build AI agents tailored to their role to execute complex tasks without ever leaving the platform," a representative for Cohere told Business Insider by email.

The company is now deploying North to a small set of companies in finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure as it continues to refine the platform. There is no set date for when it will make the platform available more widely.

Cohere, launched in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, has quickly grown to rival ChatGPT maker OpenAI and was valued at over $5.5 billion at its Series D funding round announced last July, Bloomberg reported. As of last March, the company had an annualized revenue of $35 million, up from $13 million at the end of 2023.

The company is one of a few AI startups that are building their own large language models from the ground up. Unlike its competitors, it has focused on creating customized solutions for businesses rather than consumer apps or the more nebulous goal of artificial general intelligence.

Its partners include major companies like software company Oracle, IT company Fujitsu, and consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

This year, however, its goal is to "move beyond generic LLMs towards tuned and highly optimized end-to-end solutions that address the specific objectives of a business," Gomez said in a post on LinkedIn outlining the company's objectives for 2025.

• Wildfires are burning across Los Angeles County.
• Hundreds of thousands of people are under evacuation orders or warnings.
• Insured losses could top $20 billion, JPMorgan analysts estimated — the most-ever in California.

The Los Angeles area is battling a series of massive wildfires that continue to rip through its picturesque mountains and hillsides — creating a hellscape of burned-out neighborhoods and upended livelihoods that could ultimately be the most costly fire disaster in California history.

Authorities on Friday night expanded the evacuation zone related to the largest blaze, the Palisades Fire, east toward Santa Monica, less than 1.5 miles from the iconic Santa Monica Pier. The zone now encompasses the famous Getty Center, home of the Getty Museum.

Officials have now ordered over 153,000 residents to evacuate and warned another 166,000 to be ready to leave if the fires continue to spread. About 38,000 acres have burned. Officials have reported 13 deaths related to the fire as of Saturday.

At a press conference on Friday evening, officials managing the Eaton fire, which now spans over 14,000 acres and is one of the largest and deadliest, said they did not expect the blaze to spread significantly over the weekend due to more moderate wind conditions. However, officials said they are anticipating another high-wind event early next week. It was strong Santa Ana gusts of up to 90 miles per hour that first whipped the fires into a frenzy earlier this week.

JPMorgan analysts said the blazes tearing through the region could lead to over $20 billion in insured losses — and about $50 billion in total economic losses. That would make these conflagrations "significantly more severe" than the Camp Fires that struck the state in 2018 and racked up $10 billion in insured losses, the current record.

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman described the scene in LA as apocalyptic, as thick bands of smoke surrounded the city. Los Angeles County is home to about 10 million people.

"Not since the 1990s, when Los Angeles was hit with the fires, the flood, the earthquake, and the riots, have I seen such disaster occur here in our city," Hochman said at a briefing, referring to the Northridge Earthquake and the disturbances in the wake of the Rodney King verdict.

Erroneous emergency alerts telling residents to evacuate areas unaffected by the fires further heightened panic in the region. Kevin McGowan, the director of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, apologized for the messages at Friday's conference.

"There is an extreme amount of frustration, anger, fear, with regards to the erroneous messages that have been being sent out through the wireless emergency alert system. I can't express enough how sorry I am for this experience," he said.

He reassured residents that resolving the issue is his "top priority" and that he has technical specialists working to identify the root cause. "I implore everyone to not disable the messages on your phone," he said.

Late Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration warned civilians against flying unauthorized drones in areas undergoing firefighting efforts, after a firefighting plane sustained wing damage from a civilian drone and had to be grounded.

Satellite images of the LA fires showed the destruction left in their wake.

Starlink, Elon Musk's SpaceX subsidiary that provides satellite internet service, said Thursday that people in the Los Angeles area can use the company's network to text loved ones, contact 911, and receive emergency alerts.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday announced that he's doubling the number of California National Guard personnel on the ground to 1,680 members.

"The men and women of the California National Guard are working day and night to help Los Angeles residents during their greatest time of need," he said in a statement.

Here's a look at the latest happenings in the main fires spreading throughout the area:

Palisades Fire

The Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades area north of Santa Monica was the first fire to strike the region on Tuesday morning. It has spread to over 21,500 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Around 11% of the fire is contained, it says.

Five people have died in the Palisades fire, according to the medical examiner's office.

Los Angeles City's Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at a press briefing earlier this week that the Palisades Fire had damaged or destroyed over 5,300 structures.

Crowley would not confirm reports that the fire started in a resident's garden, saying the origin is still under investigation.

Some celebrities have lost homes in the blaze, including Paris Hilton and Billy Crystal.

On Thursday, a drone hit the wing of one of two Super Scooper planes fighting the wildfires, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said at a Friday press conference. He said the plane was under urgent repairs and set to be flying again by Monday. "If you fly a drone at one of these brush fires all aerial operations will be shut down," he said.

Eaton Fire

The second-largest fire in Los Angeles County is the Eaton Fire, which started on Tuesday evening in the Pasadena-Altadena area at the foothills of the Angeles National Forest.

Eight people have died in the Eaton fire, Los Angeles County Sheriff Commander Tania E. Plunkett said at a press conference on Saturday afternoon.

The blaze has spread to over 14,100 acres, Marrone said at the Saturday conference, adding that over 7,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed and 15% of the fire is contained.

The cause of the fire remains "unknown," Marrone previously said.

Hurst Fire

The Hurst Fire, which began late on Tuesday night in the northern part of the San Fernando Valley, spread to 799 acres and is 76% contained, per Cal Fire.

In an X post on Thursday afternoon, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the mandatory evacuation order for the Hurst Fire had been lifted.

Kenneth Fire

On Thursday, a small brush fire erupted at the Victory Trailhead near the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Marrone said that the fire had been stopped. It burned just over 1,000 acres, but no structures were reported damaged. It is 80% contained, per Cal Fire.

A mandatory evacuation order was issued for several neighborhoods near the fire.

LAPD said it had detained a possible arson suspect but could not confirm any connection to the fire.

An evacuation notice intended for residents impacted by the Kenneth Fire was mistakenly sent out across LA County due to a "technical error," County Supervisor Janice Hahn said in an X post.

Sunset Fire and others

The Sunset Fire broke out in the Runyon Canyon area of the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening, quickly spreading to scorch over 40 acres and threaten major LA landmarks.

As of Thursday morning, firefighters were able to stop the fire's forward progress, Crowley said.

All evacuation orders related to the Sunset Fire were lifted as of 7:30 a.m. Thursday, she added.

A large structure fire consumed two large homes in the Studio City area but firefighters were able to stop its forward growth at just one acre and prevent another brushfire, Crowley said.

Yet another fire, the Lidia Fire, started Wednesday afternoon in Acton near the Antelope Valley, about 20 miles northeast of the San Fernando Valley. It consumed 395 acres but is now 100% contained, according to CalFire.

The Woodley Fire, which began Wednesday morning in the southern part of the San Fernando Valley, has been suppressed and there are no current threats, Crowley said.

Patrols were monitoring the area for any flare-ups, she added.

Events canceled and landmarks closed as smoke chokes LA

Major and minor events alike have been canceled or postponed across the Los Angeles area as the city battles the fires.

The 30th Annual Critics Choice Awards, set for Sunday night, were rescheduled for January 26. A National Hockey League game between the Los Angeles Kings and the Calgary Flames, scheduled for Wednesday night at Crypto.com arena, was postponed. The LA Lakers rescheduled Thursday night's game.

Music venues across the city were also canceling or postponing their shows, including The Troubadour, The Wiltern, The Echo, the Kia Forum, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and others.

Flights into and out of LAX, Hollywood Burbank Airport, Ontario International Airport, and Santa Ana's John Wayne Airport were also experiencing delays and cancellations. LAX, however, remains open.

The fires are also shuttering tourist destinations in and around Los Angeles, which attracts nearly 50 million visitors a year.

The fires forced some Los Angeles-area landmarks to close, including the Hollywood sign, the Los Angeles Zoo, the Broad Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, the Getty Villa and Getty Center, Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal CityWalk, and the Griffith Observatory.

Airbnb told CNN that it would be allowing refunds for bookings in areas affected by the wildfires, following a viral social media post from a customer who said the company refused to offer her a refund.

California already struggled with an insurance crisis

The devastating fires this week will likely only worsen California's ongoing insurance crisis, where many homebuyers already struggle to get approved for loans, home insurance, and fire insurance — even in areas outside the typical risk zones.

In recent years, some insurance companies, like State Farm, have stopped accepting new home insurance policies in the state entirely, as wildfire risks have only increased.

Experts told Business Insider that prices are likely to continue rising for those who can still get insurance.

"I've seen numbers go up 200%, 300%, even 500% in a year," Nick Ramirez, the owner of a California insurance agency, told BI.

And as the fires' estimated damages already climb into the billions of dollars, some homeowners will have to rebuild without the help of insurance payouts.

• Job cuts are continuing into 2025 following waves of reductions last year.
• Companies such as Meta, Microsoft, BlackRock, and BP are conducting layoffs.
• See the list of companies letting workers go in 2025.

Layoffs and other workforce reductions are continuing in 2025, following two years of significant job cuts across tech, media, finance, manufacturing, retail, and energy.

While the reasons for slimming staff vary, the cost-cutting measures are coming amid a backdrop of technological change. In a recent World Economic Forum survey, some 41% of companies worldwide said they expected to reduce their workforces over the next five years because of the rise of artificial intelligence.

Companies such as CNN, Dropbox, and IBM have previously announced job cuts related to AI. Tech jobs in big data, fintech, and AI are meanwhile expected to double by 2030, according to the WEF.

Here are the companies with job cuts planned or already underway in 2025 so far.

CNN plans to cut 200 jobs.

Cable news giant CNN is cutting about 200 television-focused roles as part of a digital pivot. The cuts will amount to about 6% of the company's workforce.

In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, CNN's CEO Mark Thompson said he aimed to "shift CNN's gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN's future as one of the world's greatest news organizations."

Starbucks is planning layoffs in March.

Global coffee chain Starbucks announced it is planning layoffs in March.

In a memo to staff on January 21, Brian Nicoll, the company's chairman and CEO, said: "We need to meaningfully change how our support teams are organized and how we work," and as part of that, "we will have job eliminations and smaller support teams moving forward."

Nicoll said the changes would be communicated to staff by early March.

Stripe is laying off 300 employees.

Payments platform Stripe is cutting 300 employees, primarily in product, engineering, and operations, according to a January 20 memo obtained by BI.

Chief People Officer Rob McIntosh said in the memo that the company still planned on growing its head count to about 10,000 employees by the end of the year.

BP slashing 7,700 staff and contractor positions worldwide.

BP told Business Insider it plans to cut 4,700 staff and 3,000 contractors, amounting to about 5% of its global workforce.

The cuts are part of a program to "simplify and focus" BP that began last year.

"We are strengthening our competitiveness and building in resilience as we lower our costs, drive performance improvement and play to our distinctive capabilities," the company said.

Meta is cutting 5% of its workforce.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told staff he "decided to raise the bar on performance management" and will act quickly to "move out low-performers," according to an internal memo seen by BI.

In a post on the company's internal communications platform, he said Meta will make "more extensive performance-based cuts" in this year's performance review cycle. Impacted US employees will be notified on February 10, he wrote.

The company has laid off more than 21,000 workers since 2022.

BlackRock is cutting 1% of its workforce.

BlackRock told employees it was planning to cut about 200 people of its 21,000-strong workforce, according to Bloomberg.

The reductions are more than offset by some 3,750 workers who were added last year and another 2,000 expected to be added in 2025.

BlackRock's president, Rob Kapito, and its chief operating officer, Rob Goldstein, said the cuts would help realign the firm's resources with its strategy, Bloomberg reported.

Bridgewater has cut about 90 staff.

Bridgewater Associates cut 7% of its staff in January in an effort to stay lean, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

The layoffs at the world's largest hedge fund bring its head count back to where it was in 2023, the person said.

The company's founder, Ray Dalio, said in a 2019 interview that about 30% of new employees were leaving the firm within 18 months.

The Washington Post is cutting 4% of its non-newsroom workforce.

The Washington Post is eliminating less than 100 employees in an effort to cut costs, Reuters reported in January.

A spokesperson told the wire service that the changes would occur across multiple areas of the business and indicated that the cuts wouldn't affect the newsroom.

"The Washington Post is continuing its transformation to meet the needs of the industry, build a more sustainable future and reach audiences where they are," the spokesperson said, according to Reuters.

Microsoft is planning an unspecified number of cuts.

Microsoft is planning job cuts soon, and the company is taking a harder look at underperforming employees as part of the reductions, according to two people familiar with the plans.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed cuts but declined to share details on the number of employees being let go.

"At Microsoft we focus on high performance talent," the spokesperson said. "We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action."

Ally is cutting less than 5% of workers.

The digital-financial-services company Ally is laying off roughly 500 of its 11,000 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to BI.

"As we continue to right-size our company, we made the difficult decision to selectively reduce our workforce in some areas, while continuing to hire in our other areas of our business," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also said the company was offering severance, out-placement support, and the opportunity to apply for openings at Ally.

Ally made a similar level of cuts in October 2023, the Charlotte Observer reported.

Adidas plans to cut up to 500 jobs in Germany.

Adidas intends to reduce the size of its workforce at its headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany, impacting up to 500 jobs, CNBC reported.

If fully executed, it amounts to a reduction of nearly 9% at the company headquarters, which employs about 5,800 employees, according to the Adidas website.

The news comes shortly after the company announced it had outperformed its profit expectations at the end of 2024, touting "better-than-expected" results in the fourth quarter.

"Strong growth across all regions and divisions proves the good job our teams are doing across regions and functions," CEO Bjørn Gulden said in a press release. "So although we are not yet where we want to be long term, I am very happy with this development which was much better than we had expected."

In a statement to BI, an Adidas spokesperson said the company had grown "too complex because of our current operating model."

"To set adidas up for long-term success," the spokesperson said, "we are now starting to look at how we align our operating model with the reality of how we work. This may have an impact on the organizational structure and number of roles based at our HQ in Herzogenaurach."

The company said it is not a cost-cutting measure and that it could not confirm concrete numbers.

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