The report said coworkers had taken to joking about anxiety and insomnia, with one employee likening the atmosphere to the hit Netflix drama "Squid Game," where characters must fight for their lives while playing children's games.
Tesla representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The billionaire had reportedly pushed for a 20% head count reduction to match the company's quarterly vehicle deliveries decline.
Tesla's delivery numbers slumped prior to the layoff announcement, falling below Wall Street's already pessimistic estimates.
Deliveries in the first quarter fell by a fifth compared with the previous quarter and by more than 8% versus the same period the previous year, marking the company's first year-on-year sales decline since 2020.
The rolling layoffs have affected several of Tesla's key divisions, wiping out almost all the Supercharger team. According to a report from Reuters, the team's decimation came afterthe division's chief refused to conduct further layoffs.
Musk has reportedly since backtracked on this decision and rehired some of those workers.
The CEO has also denied a Reuters report last month that Tesla was scrapping plans for a long-awaited $25,000 model in favor of prioritizing a robotaxi.
Tesla stock is down close to 30% since the start of the year, valuing the automaker at just over $550 billion.
Virgin Atlantic cut thousands of jobs after the pandemic struck in 2020.
More than 200 former cabin crew are suing the airline claiming unfair dismissal.
They claim older staff were unfairly targeted, while those with little experience were kept on.
Virgin Atlantic is being sued by more than 200 former cabin crew, claiming the airline unfairly targeted older staff for dismissals during the pandemic, The Guardian reported.
The airline, founded by billionaire Richard Branson, cut 3,000 jobs — about a third of its workforce — in May 2020. Virgin Atlantic also retired its Boeing 747 jumbo jets a year early and closed its base at London Gatwick Airport as it tried to avoid bankruptcy.
Some staff who were made redundant — a UK employment process similar to layoffs but with more legal protections — were then added to a "holding pool" to potentially be rehired.
In its 2021 annual report, Virgin Atlantic said it rehired 99 pilots and 724 cabin crew from the holding pool, "something we had committed to doing as soon as possible in the reorganization of 2020."
However, it is claimed that mostly new cabin crew were added to the pool, some of whom had as little as one week's training, The Guardian reported. Cabin managers, with an average age of 45 and with 20 years of experience, were made redundant, per the report.
The claims are set to be examined by an employment tribunal in London starting next month. About 150 workers are reportedly being represented by the Cabin Crew Union, another 51 by a law firm, and a further 11 elsewhere.
Susan Mcentegart, a 53-year-old former cabin manager who worked at the airline for 23 years, told The Guardian: "It seemed the world was closing down and losing jobs was inevitable. But the way they went about it seemed unfair."
"I was flabbergasted that I wasn't in the holding pool," she added. "There were people who hadn't even got their wings — after six weeks of training — in the pool, and there seemed to be too many of us of an age that were left out."
Virgin Atlantic said in a statement: "Throughout the redundancy process, we were committed to ensuring all our people were treated fairly and compassionately. To allow as many of our people to return as soon as demand allowed, we introduced a holding pool, which meant that more than 1,000 of our cabin crew returned at their previous level of seniority.
"Where people had to unfortunately leave us, it was for unbiased, objective and lawful reasons, after full consultation with our recognized unions, elected colleague representatives and clear and open continued communication."
The company shared a blog post on X, saying: "We've heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them."
Many social-media users linked the latest update to Jonze's prophetic film, comparing the voice with Johansson's character in Spike Jonze's 2013 film "Her." The plot features a man falling in love with an AI system.
Some commentators complained that the bot's voice sounded overly sexual and was too flirty in some of the demos.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even appeared to address the similarity, posting the word "her" on social media during a recent company demo that heavily featured the voice.
However, the company's CTO, Mira Murati, told The Verge the voice had not been designed to sound like Johansson, adding that someone in the demo's audience had asked the same question.
OpenAI addressed the comparisons with Johansson directly in the blog post, saying the voice was not modeled on Johansson's.
"Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice. To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents," the company said in the post.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
Last week, the company demoed a new AI model called GPT-4o, which uses native audio inputs and outputs. When integrated into ChatGPT, users can have human-like conversations with the bot, speaking to it and showing it things.
The result is designed to feel like having a real-time virtual assistant, or what could be considered an AI best friend, in your pocket.
A 2024 satellite image of Kushchyovskaya airbase in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, used for illustration purposes. Exact date unclear.
Maxar Images/Google Earth
Ukraine launched a drone strike on a key Russian air base on Saturday, sources say.
Ukraine says many of Russia's devastating glide bombs are launched from planes at Kushchyovskaya air base.
The bombs have become a central feature of Russian attacks, notably on Chasiv Yar and Avdiivka.
Ukraine says it launched strikes on a key air base with a view to thwarting Russia's devastating glide bombs, according to Sky News.
An unnamed military source told the outlet that the operation overnight on Saturday had "significantly reduced" Russia's ability to target the front line with the bombs.
The attack took place at the Kushchyovskaya air base in Krasnodar Krai, southwest Russia, the source claimed.
Other sources corroborated that there had been some kind of attack.
The influential Russian Telegram channel ASTRA said that at least three drones had not been shot down there, citing its own unnamed sources. It said that a Su-27 aircraft at the base was damaged, as well as infrastructure there.
Russia keeps Su-27s, Su-34s, and Su-35s at Kushchyovskaya, all of which are used daily to launch the glide bombs and other attacks, Sky's source said.
Business Insider was unable to independently verify the claims.
Ukrainian law enforcement officers with knowledge of the situation told Ukrinform that the attack was a joint operation between the security service and Ukraine's specialist drone unit.
Ukraine also says it targeted the base at the end of April, The Kyiv Independent reported. Soon after that attack, the UK Ministry of Defence assessed that Russia began to pull some aircraft out of there and relocate them further from the front line.
The cheap, Soviet-era air-launched munitions are adapted with wings and a rudimentary guidance system that allows aircraft to drop them from well beyond the reach of Ukraine's air defenses.
Once launched, the bombs are difficult to intercept, and can have a devastating impact.
"These glide bombs were vital in the seizure of Avdiivka and are currently being used heavily in Chasiv Yar," the source told Sky News.
"They allow the Russian aircraft to release their bombs further away from the target so they are at less risk from Ukrainian air defense," they said.
Chasiv Yar, in Ukraine's eastern Donestk region, is a hotspot of the front line, where Ukrainian forces have dug in for several weeks.
Sited just west of the now-ruined city of Bakhmut, the hilltop town is a gateway to several key cities and supply routes.
The Ukrainian outlook on holding the city has been bleak for a while — in early May, deputy intel chief Major-General Vadym Skibitsky said it was only a matter of time before Russia took it.
Gates touted the book, "Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)," by Salman Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, an educational nonprofit that aims to provide free learning resources.
The book charts how advances in AI will transform education and offers a guidebook for teachers, parents, and students to navigate changes in this "new world," the book description reads.
"If you're passionate about education, you need to read this book." Gates wrote on X. "Sal offers a compelling vision for harnessing AI to expand opportunity for all."
Khan is familiar with the intersection of AI and education; his company is building its own educational chatbot, Khanmigo. It aims to assist students in a variety of subjects, including math, computer science, and writing.
He spoke on the topic in a TED Talk last year. "I think we're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen," he said. "The way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent, but amazing, personal tutor."
Gates has also been optimistic about AI's role in education. He published a letter last year full of his AI predictions, one of which was that in the next five to 10 years, AI could start delivering educational content tailored to a student's learning style.
But while he said that teachers likely wouldn't become redundant, they might need to learn how to adapt to the new technology.
"It will enhance — but never replace — the work that students and teachers do together in the classroom," he wrote.
The group was on a helicopter ride back from a ceremony marking a dam opening near Azerbaijan's border when it crashed into trees in the region of Iran's East Azerbaijan province, per Al Jazeera.
Interior Minister Ahmed Vahidi told IRNA, Iran's state-run news agency, that the helicopter carrying Raisi and other senior Iranian officials was forced to make a "hard landing" on Sunday, but failed to offer details.
The search was "extremely difficult" due to darkness, dense fog, and rain, Pirhossein Koulivand, the head of Iran's Emergency Medical Services, said on Iranian state TV about 10 hours into the operation, per Bloomberg.
State TV said the helicopter crashed into a mountain. While there is no official statement on the cause, images of the crash site captured by ISNA, Iran's state students' news agency, showed heavy fog lingering over the area.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), flying in fog is challenging, even for the most experienced of pilots. "For pilots that are not as skilled, fog is an extremely dangerous and potentially deadly hazard," it said.
Raisi's helicopter crash follows a series of deadly helicopter and plane crashes in foggy weather conditions.
Last year, a helicopter carrying Ukraine's then-interior minister crashed into a kindergarten in a foggy residential suburb of Kyiv, claiming his life and that of a dozen people, authorities said at the time, per AP.
India's top military official, Gen. Bipin Rawat, and his wife perished with 11 other passengers in December 2021 after their helicopter flew unusually low and through heavy fog before crashing into a hillside in southern India, eyewitnesses told Reuters at the time.
In January 2020, Kobe Bryant's helicopter crashed in foggy conditions while en route from John Wayne Airport to Camarillo Airport, killing the NBA legend, his then-13-year-old daughter, Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, and his family. The pilot of the helicopter likely became disorientated amid fog, US safety investigators said.
Ten years earlier, Poland's then-President Lech Kaczynski, the first lady, and 94 others died in a plane crash after pilots tried to land in thick fog with reduced visibility near the western Russian city of Smolensk, according to a final report by the country's committee for Investigation on National Aviation Accidents.
In 1994, a Chinook Mk2 helicopter carrying 25 senior British intelligence experts crashed into the hillside on the Mull of Kintyre in southwest Scotland after the pilot flew too fast and too low in foggy conditions, killing all passengers on board, the UK's Defence Committee said at the time.
Raisi's body and those of the other passengers who died in the helicopter crash are being transported to the city of Tabriz, where an autopsy will take place, followed by a first official state funeral on Tuesday, according to Al-Jazeera.
The company has been on the defensive following the departure of key safety researchers, reports that strict NDAs are silencing former employees, and backlash against a new version of ChatGPT.
The dramatic exits of Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever last week even forced OpenAI's leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, to make public statements defending their efforts to control AI risk.
When a Vox report about OpenAI's tight off-boarding agreements emerged the following day, Altman responded by saying it was one of the "few times" he'd ever "been genuinely embarrassed" running OpenAI. He added he wasn't aware the clauses were being imposed on departing employees and said the company was working to rectify the agreement.
It's a rare admission from Altman, who has worked hard to cultivate an image of being relatively calm amid OpenAI's ongoing chaos. A failed coup to remove him last year ultimately bolstered the CEO's reputation, but it seems OpenAI's cracks are starting to show once more.
Safety team implosion
OpenAI has been in full damage control mode following the exit of key employees working on AI safety.
Leike and Sutskever, who led the team responsible for ensuring AGI doesn't go rogue and harm humanity, both resigned last week.
Leike followed his blunt resignation with a lengthy post on X, accusing his former employers of putting "shiny products" ahead of safety. He said the safety team was left "struggling for compute, and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done."
Quick to play the role of crisis manager, Altman shared Leike's post, saying, "He's right, we have a lot more to do; we are committed to doing it."
The high-profile resignations follow several other recent exits.
According to a report by The Information, two safety researchers, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov, were recently fired over claims they were leaking information.
Safety and governance researchers Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders also both recently left the company, while Cullen O'Keefe, a research lead on policy frontier, left in April, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Kokotajlo told Vox he'd "gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle AGI."
The Superalignment team led by Leike and Sutskever, which had about 20 members last year, has now been dissolved. A spokesperson for OpenAI told The Information that it had combined the remaining staffers with its broader research team to meet its superalignment goals.
OpenAI has another team focused on safety called Preparedness, but the high-profile resignations and departures aren't a good look for a company at the forefront of advanced AI development.
Silenced employees
The implosion of the safety team is a blow for Altman, who has been keen to show he's safety-conscious when it comes to developing super-intelligent AI.
He told Joe Rogan's podcast last year: "Many of us were super worried, and still are, about safety and alignment. In terms of the 'not destroy humanity' version of it, we have a lot of work to do, but I think we finally have more ideas about what can work."
Some think Leike's claims erode Altman's authority on the subject and have raised eyebrows more widely.
Neel Nanda, who runs Google DeepMind's mechanistic interpretability team tasked with "reducing existential risk from AI," responded to Leike's thread: "Pretty concerning stories of what's happening inside OpenAI."
On Friday, Vox reported that strict offboarding agreements essentially silenced OpenAI employees.
They reportedly included non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses that could take away employees' vested equity if they criticized their former employer, or even acknowledge that an NDA existed.
Altman addressed the report in an X post: "This is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have."
He added: "The team was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so."
"Her" voice paused
Despite OpenAI's efforts to contain the chaos, the scrutiny doesn't appear to be over.
On Monday, the company said it was pausing ChatGPT's "Sky" voice, which has recently been likened to Scarlett Johansson.
"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," the company said in a post.
The voice, a key part of the company's GPT-4o demo, was widely compared to Johansson's virtual assistant character in the film"Her." Altman even appeared to acknowledge the similarities, simply posting "her" on X during the demo.
Some users complained about the chatbot's new voice, calling it overly sexual and too flirty in demo videos circulating online.
Seemingly oblivious to the criticism, OpenAI appeared triumphant following the launch. The usually reserved Altman even appeared to shade Google, which demoed new AI products the following day.
"I try not to think about competitors too much, but I cannot stop thinking about the aesthetic difference between openai and google," Altman wrote on X, accompanied by images of the rival demos.
OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
Robyn Denholm, the chair of Tesla's board, admitted to the Financial Times that she has had "tough conversations" with CEO Elon Musk over his social media posts and said that if she had her way, Twitter, now X, wouldn't exist.
"If I had a magic wand, Twitter wouldn't exist," Denholm said.
Musk bought the social media site in 2022, and his posting style has long courted controversy — but Denholm defended the billionaire, describing him as a "contrarian" from whom a certain amount of controversy was to be expected.
"He's a contrarian, and you can't be a contrarian part of the time, so you've got to work with that as a board," she said.
"I might wake up in the morning and read a tweet that I wasn't expecting. I don't wake up to a strategy shift that we haven't talked about," Denholm added.
Denholm became Tesla's chair in 2018 after Musk stepped down following a settlement with the SEC over the billionaire's infamous "funding secured" tweet.
Musk's statement that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share cost him $20 million in fines and saddled him with a "Twitter sitter," a company lawyer who must vet any posts about Tesla before he sends them.
Musk has continued to court controversy with his social media activity ever since, attracting criticism last year when he called an antisemitic post the "actual truth" — a move which sparked a backlash from some Tesla investors.
Tesla is currently trying to get shareholders to vote in favor of reapproving Musk's $55 billion pay package after his ambitious 2018 pay deal was struck down by a Delaware judge earlier this year.
The carmaker is going all out to get the package passed, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Denholm, who is based in Sydney, plans to travel across the globe to persuade shareholders to vote.
Denholm told the FT that Tesla faced a "huge hill to climb" to get the compensation package approved, having previously called Musk's $55 billion payday "critical to the future success of Tesla."
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
It's not all about what you know, he said, but rather, it's about having a good attitude.
"I think an embarrassing amount of how well you do, particularly in your 20s, has to do with attitude," he told Roslansky.
But that doesn't just mean being easy to get along with, he explained. It's also about how hard you work, whether you can work on a team, whether you stick to what you say you're going to do, and whether you're a can-do person over being a naysayer.
"People would be surprised how infrequently people have great attitudes," he said, even if it may sound "simple."
Having a good attitude means people in your professional life root for you — you pick up advocates and mentors more quickly as people want you to succeed, Jassy explained.
Mentorship can be a way for people to supercharge their careers. Having a mentor can be a boost to self-confidence in the workplace and a way to gain some career guidance — whether that's help with promotions, finding new challenges, or even a career change.
Jassy himself was taken under the wing of Amazon founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos. After dotting around a bunch of roles at the company since 1997, he was approached by Bezos to be his "shadow" — a role that allowed him to go along to all the CEO's meetings, including his one-on-ones, and they'd discuss and strategize together.
He took over as Amazon's second CEO in 2021 after Bezos stepped down. He proved himself by serving as CEO of AWS, the company's cloud computing platform, from 2016 to 2021, where he grew the segment to a $40 billion business.
Kris Neilson, 59, went back to school in her 50s to pursue an MBA.
Kris Neilson
Kris Neilson, 59, decided to go back to school and pursue her MBA in her 50s.
While she had a bachelor's degree, she wasn't advancing in her career or increasing her earnings.
Although she had to take out student loans, she believes education later in life can pay off.
Despite earning her bachelor's degree decades ago, Kris Neilson's career has remained stagnant.
Neilson, 59, went into retail management after earning a general studies degree with a business concentration. While she moved on to other sales jobs and eventually landed her current role at a nonprofit, her wages weren't increasing that much, and she wasn't passionate about the work she was doing.
On top of that, she recognized herself as the second-income earner in her marriage — she was earning money to contribute to the household, which she said fit her and her family's situation at the time.
But things have changed. Neilson and her then-husband divorced nine years ago, leaving her without a chunk of the income she was used to having to support herself. Her income at the time was enough to cover her basic expenses, but she didn't have any extra money to put toward retirement, so she started sending out dozens of job applications, to no avail.
"Ageism was, and is, extremely prevalent," Neilson told Business Insider. "And because I didn't have a strong skill set, or at least a marketable one, I was barely getting by. I was using family members to help me cover my expenses."
Neilson took that as a sign that it was time for her to return to school and give herself another chance to advance in her career and further her education. At 57, she enrolled in an online program part time to pursue an MBA, and she graduated thisMay.
She now has just over $42,000 in student loans, according to documents reviewed by BI — meaning that instead of saving more for retirement, she has to focus on paying off her debt. But she thinks it'll be worth it.
"I believe in lifelong learning, and I just don't want to be irrelevant," Neilson said. "I don't want my skills to fall back again."
It can be difficult for older adults to return to school due to the demands of the workforce, but with a degree still providing value in terms of career advancement and higher wages, it's a path some adults might choose to take. According to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper, about 20% of college graduates born in 1930 and later got their degrees after age 30.
Additionally, per the paper, 70% of the increase in overall college completion from 1990 to 2010 can be attributed to the increasing number of adults getting their degrees after their mid-twenties. It found that while younger graduates have the greatest wage benefits they can enjoy for longer, "late graduates also receive a substantial college premium after graduation," suggesting they can also receive wage benefits.
It's too early for Neilson to know if her degree will pay off, but she said she didn't think it was too late to give herself a chance.
"This definitely boosted my confidence, but it certainly doesn't just feel like I'm set," she said. "It keeps me hungry for more. I feel like I need to continue to pursue further education, just so I do have something that people want."
'It's scary as hell'
The uncertainty about where Neilson will go now that she has her MBA is unnerving. She'll soon have to begin paying off her student loans, which means she'll have even less money to save — and she said she doesn't see herself retiring until she's 75, at the earliest.
"I have my MBA, but I'm still a 59-year-old woman, single, and I not only need to keep my skills sharp, but I need to keep my health sharp, so it's scary as hell," Neilson said. "The money that I would like to be able to contribute to a retirement account is going to go instead to pay student loans."
BI has previously spoken to some other older adults who have struggled with career progression later in life. For example, Crystal, a 62-year-old, never received a college degree, and it's kept her from progressing in the workforce. She said she sees herself working part-time well into retirement because she cannot afford to go without a paycheck.
"With my age, I was just not attractive on paper, and not having a college degree was always a factor, too," Crystal said. "I could send out 200 applications and résumés and maybe get two calls and then not even be invited in for an interview."
It shows how, even as more Gen Zers do not see the value of higher education, a degree is still coveted — a recent report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation found that adults' interest in higher educationis "as at the highest level" the organizations have recorded.
Of course, it's not something everyone can afford. Still, Neilson said she felt she owed it to herself to take on student loans and continue her education, and she thinks it's an option that should be more readily available to older adults.
"I don't want to live life and regret it, but I really shake my head when I think about a path that I wish I would have known about, known better or known different when I was younger and had had the foresight," Neilson said. "But I'm really glad I did what I did, even though it's scary to know what the future holds."
Did you return to school later in life? What impact has it had on you? Share your story with this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.