Category: Business Insider

• A millennial in California is secretly working a second remote job so he can afford weight-loss drugs.
• He said taking Mounjaro and Zepbound has helped him lose 45 pounds. 
• He's on track to make $166,000 this year and said he doesn't work more than 60 hours a week. 

Last August, George decided he wanted to try to work a second remote job — and not tell his employers he was job juggling.

The California–based millennial was bored with his contract finance gig in the biotech industry, he told Business Insider via email. And he thought the extra income would help him afford rent, pay down credit card debt, and travel more.

But there was another big reason he wanted to be "overemployed:" It would help him afford weight-loss drugs.

"I wanted to start on Mounjaro and knew I couldn't afford the out-of-pocket cost without a second job," said George, whose identity is known to BI but has been withheld due to his fear of professional repercussions.

Mounjaro is among the appetite-suppressing GLP-1 drugs that have helped some people manage their weight. The Eli Lilly-produced drug received FDA approval in 2022 as a diabetes treatment, and last November, the FDA approved Zepbound — a weight-loss-specific version of the drug with the same main ingredient. Mounjaro and Zepbound are in the same class of drugs as Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy.

Weight-loss drugs have grown in popularity over the last year, but their costs have kept them out of reach for some people. Zepbound and Wegovy each cost over $1,000 a month, require weekly injections, and may need to be taken on a long-term basis to sustain any weight loss. What's more, many insurance plans don't cover them.

In late September, George started a second full-time remote job in the same industry. He's on track to earn roughly $166,000 this year across his jobs, according to documents viewed by Business Insider. The contract roles pay a combined $80 an hour, and George said occasional overtime pay offsets the lack of paid vacation time. He said he's only told his family and a few friends about his overemployment.

George said roughly doubling his earnings has had a huge impact on his life. He was able to afford Mounjaro and said he's dropped 45 pounds — from 220 lbs to 175 lbs — since he started taking it in October. The extra income has also helped him pay down credit card debt and made his monthly bills much more manageable.

"I don't stress about every little cent anymore," he said. "It has been tremendously freeing."

George is among a niche group of remote workers secretly holding multiple jobs and earning well over six figures a year. These people have used their extra income to pay off mortgages, save for an early retirement, and take lavish vacations. While some bosses may be fine with employees taking on extra work, being caught doing so without company approval could be a fireable offense.

For George, his overemployment has been worth the risk.

Working efficiently is the key to avoiding burnout as an overemployed worker

When George began looking for a second job, he said he didn't know anything about the overemployed community or the subreddit where job jugglers share tips and tricks. He said his job search consisted of working with a few recruiters and staffing firms and applying for jobs on his own.

After a roughly monthlong search, he started his second job and was able to afford Mounjaro.

Between October and the end of 2023, George paid over $3,200 for three months of Mounjaro injections, according to a document viewed by Business Insider.

But when Eli Lilly rolled out its new weight-loss drug Zepbound in November, it began offering discounted prescriptions of Zepbound to patients whose insurance didn't cover the drug. George switched to Zepbound and said he's now paying roughly $550 a month for his weight-loss medication, though this discount could expire at the end of 2024.

George hasn't had too much trouble juggling multiple jobs — he said he typically gets all his work done in less than 60 hours a week. While one of his teams goes into the office every once in a while for a happy hour, he said this isn't mandatory.

His main piece of advice for job jugglers: Stay on top of your workload.

"I have had a few extremely late nights trying to get everything done because I didn't allocate time correctly during the week," he said.

If his overemployment regularly required him to work 60-plus hour weeks, he said it wouldn't be sustainable.

Going forward, George said he plans to continue taking Zepbound, but that he's open to trying a different drug if it's more affordable. He has no plans to give up his overemployment, in large part because it's made his recent weight loss journey possible.

"If one contract ends for some reason, I will definitely be seeking another to replace it," he said.

Are you working multiple remote jobs at the same time and willing to discuss details about your pay and schedule? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@insider.com.

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• Politicians say Russia poses the gravest threat to European security since World War II. 
• But Russia is weakened by the Ukraine war and is in no position to attack NATO, experts say.
• Instead, the Russian president wants to weaken and undermine NATO from within, analysts believe. 

The era of relative peace and prosperity the West has enjoyed since the end of World War II may fast be coming to an end.

In March, Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, said Europe was in a "pre-war" era and that Russia must not defeat Ukraine for the security of the continent.

"I don't want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past," Tusk said in an interview with several European media outlets. "It is real. In fact, it already started more than two years ago," referencing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It's one of a series of increasingly stark warnings that the war in Ukraine could be a prelude to a much bigger conflict.

German military planning documents leaked in January imagined Russia launching a massive 2024 offensive to take advantage of waning Western support in Ukraine.

The documents, obtained by Bild, then envisage Russia turning its sights on NATO members in Eastern Europe, with it seeking to destabilize its enemies through cyberattacks and internal chaos in the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.

Germany isn't the only one. Late last year, Poland's national security agency estimated that Russia could attack NATO within three years.

The members of the 32-member NATO alliance are each sworn to protect each other from attack under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. That means a Russian attack on one member could spark a war involving several nuclear-armed states.

But whether Putin really does intend to attack NATO and what an attack might look like remains unclear.

In March, Putin denied having any plans to attack NATO members, describing such claims as "complete nonsense."

Western military chiefs are not convinced, however. A month earlier, Putin menaced the West with the prospect of a nuclear attack over its support for Ukraine.

He alluded to a recent suggestion by French President Emmanuel Macron that NATO could send troops to Ukraine to support its fight against the Russian invasion.

Analysts told Business Insider that Russia is weakened by the toll of the Ukraine war and in no position to attack the alliance.

But Putin is playing a long game, and the outcome of the Ukraine war and Russia's long-standing bid to undermine and corrode NATO will be key factors in deciding whether Russia strikes.

Putin plots to corrode NATO

Putin has a key advantage over the West, Philip Ingram, a former UK military intelligence officer, told BI.

While Western leaders plan within election cycles of around four years, Putin is an authoritarian leader with no serious challengers to his power. That means he can look decades ahead.

"He does not want, at this moment, a direct confrontation with NATO," said Ingram. "But he thinks in a different way and plans in a different way to we do in the West, and therefore the way NATO countries do."

"So, his ambition in growing is not going to be that he will attack NATO and NATO countries next year. But he will set the conditions to be able to, " Ingram said.

Analysts like Ingram believe that Putin realizes attacking NATO now would exact a vast and punishing cost on Russia. Instead, Putin will seek to weaken NATO from within to create soft spots he can strike in the future if he chooses.

To do this, Putin will likely intensify Russia's so-called "hybrid warfare" against NATO countries.

As NATO puts it, hybrid warfare "often plays out in gray zones below the threshold of a conventional war."

"The instruments or tools employed and fused together to unleash hybrid warfare are often difficult to discern, attribute, and corroborate."

They can include spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation, boosting extremist parties in certain countries, stoking terror threats, and launching cyber attacks to undermine the foundation of Western societies.

"The threat posed by Russia to NATO is unlikely to be an invasion, it's more likely to come from a range of other military and non-military threats – what are often called hybrid threats," Ruth Deyermond, an expert on the Russian military at King's College London told BI.

A core aim is to prise away the US from its commitment to defend its European allies, either by hoping it gets embroiled in another costly military campaign elsewhere, or tires of the NATO project.

"For this reason, I expect we'll see Russia using all of the tricks and capabilities in its cupboard to undermine Western unity over the years to come," Bryden Spurling, an analyst with the RAND Corporation, told BI.

A covert war is already underway

Russia, some point out, is already engaged in a war with NATO, albeit covertly.

Only days ago, a group of men in the UK were accused of conducting arson attacks on a Ukraine-linked business on behalf of Russian intelligence. This is just one example of "hybrid warfare" tactics.

In recent months, Russia has also been accused of being behind the scrambling of GPS plane navigation systems in northern Europe and the Baltics, in what some claim could be part of a "hybrid warfare" attack.

Robert Dover, a professor of international security at the University of Hull in the UK, said the question of whether Russia will attack NATO is already redundant. "Russia is already engaged in a meaningful conflict with NATO countries and their allies," he pointed out.

The Ukraine war exposed serious limits to NATO's military power. The alliance has struggled to produce enough artillery shells and ammunition for Ukraine.

During the recent block in US aid, European NATO countries were unable to make up the shortfall, and Ukraine's forces were being outfired at a rate of 10-one on parts of the front line, which were close to collapse.

The US recently released the aid, but the problems the situation exposed run deep, said Spurling, the RAND analyst. This, he said, is a weakness Russia could seek to exploit if not remedied.

"This conflict has exposed how underprepared Western militaries are for war that's not on their terms," he added. "While we maintain that fragility, there is a greater risk that Russia thinks it could chance its arm," he said.

Russia is weakened by the Ukraine war

But Russia also faces massive problems of its own. Its military has been devasted by the Ukraine invasion. According to US estimates, its entire pre-war invasion force of around 300,000 men has been killed or injured (though it has replenished those numbers), its stock of armored vehicles has been devastated, and its commanders have made consistently bad decisions.

"It's hard to imagine a near- or medium-term scenario in which the Russian government has the resources to engage in another war on anything like the scale of Ukraine," Deyermond, the expert on the Russian military at King's College London, told BI.

Any potential attack on NATO would come at such a devastating cost it could imperil Putin's grip on power.

"War with NATO would destroy Russia, as Putin will know very well, and even if he thinks there's a possibility that the US might not step up to defend a fellow NATO member from a Russian invasion, he shows no sign of wanting to find out by playing nuclear Russian roulette," said Deyermond.

But however long it takes, Putin is determined to achieve some form of victory in Ukraine so that he can use it as a platform to plan Russia's next campaign, said Ingram.

After Ukraine, Putin will survey the field and be keen to exploit further opportunities to expand Russian power.

As Ingram puts it: "He wants the Soviet Union back in the hands of a Russian leader, and that's his ultimate goal."

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• Starbucks is set to roll out its own version of boba in May, CEO Laxman Narasimhan said Tuesday.
• "We are launching our first texture innovation, Pearls," he said.
• Some Starbucks baristas have posted TikTok videos making drinks with "raspberry-popping pearls."

Starbucks is set to roll out its own version of boba at its stores this summer, more than two years after it first confirmed that it was testing drinks with pearls.

"For summer, we are launching our first texture innovation, Pearls," CEO Laxman Narasimhan told analysts at the company's earnings call Tuesday. "This is the first of more texture-based innovations that our customers can expect in the coming years."

The drink will be rolled out during the week starting May 6 as part of Starbucks' summer menu, he said.

Some TikTok users who appear to be Starbucks baristas have made videos of themselves making what they say are summer berry-flavored Refreshers from the coffee chain's upcoming range. Some of the drinks are served with raspberry-popping pearls.

Another video appeared to show a barista making an iced matcha with the pearls.

In December 2021, Starbucks confirmed to Business Insider that it was conducting a limited test of two beverages "made with coffee pearls" at two stores. A viral TikTok posted at the time appeared to show drinks called "Iced Chai Tea Latte with Coffee Pearls" and "In the Dark" on sale at a Starbucks in Palm Desert, California.

Boba, also known as bubble tea, is a Taiwanese drink typically made with milk, tea, and chewy tapioca pearls, which are created using starch from the roots of cassava plants. Sometimes, the chewy pearls are substituted for popping ones. It's usually served cold.

Iced and cold drinks are a crucial part of Starbucks' strategy: In the quarter to July 2023 — the early part of the summer season — three-quarters of the drinks it sold were cold.

Starbucks has previously sold flavored iced oolong tea with flavored pearls in some Asian markets, including plum pearls.

Alongside boba, the coffee chain is rolling out a "new functional product, a zero to low-calorie handcrafted energy beverage" and more sugar-free customization options, Narasimhan said Tuesday.

Product innovation like this helps to "elevate the brand" and boost sales, Narasimhan said. He noted that Starbucks' range of lavender-infused drinks performed nearly as well in the quarter as the chain's famous Pumpkin Spice Latte.

The drinks with popping pearls have been a long time coming. Starbucks wants to roll out new products more quickly: It's working on halving its average product development cycle from the current 12-to-18 months, Narasimhan said.

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• China has tested its newest aircraft carrier for the first time at sea, according to Chinese media.
• The Fujian is China's most advanced carrier and has a catapult system, unlike its predecessors.
• But it falls far short of the standards of US Navy carriers, a military analyst told CNN.

China launched the first sea trial of its newest aircraft carrier on Wednesday, per the state-run news agency Xinhua.

Fujian, the country's third and most advanced aircraft carrier, left Shanghai's shipyard at around 8 a.m. local time for trials primarily meant to assess the reliability and stability of its propulsion and electrical systems, per the news agency.

It's a major step, with the People's Liberation Army Navy reportedly looking to put its largest, most advanced carrier through sea trials for months.

However, according to John Bradford, a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow, the Fujian falls far short of US aircraft carrier standards.

While Bradford acknowledged the Fujian's sea trials as a key "milestone" for the Chinese navy, he told CNN that US carriers "remain in an echelon of their own."

Richard Kouyoumdjian Inglis, a Lieutenant Commander in the Chilean Naval Reserve, backed this up.

"There is nothing yet that compares to the USS carriers," he told Business Insider.

The Fujian was previously pictured on social media, with images showing the vessel docked in Shanghai and its flight deck complete with five mock-ups of warplanes.

Unlike China's two other carriers, the Liaoning and Shandong, the Fujian features a catapult system designed to launch aircraft, according to reports, much like US aircraft carriers.

The ship is also closer in size and flight deck configuration to US Navy carriers but falls short of them, per a report by the Congressional Research Service.

At the same time, the Fujian is conventionally powered, meaning it must either call at a port or be met by a tanker at sea to refill. In contrast, US nuclear-powered carriers can remain at sea for as long as crew provisions last, per a 2021 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Based on satellite images of the ship from 2021, the CSIS estimated the carrier to be about 984 feet long and about 131 feet wide, making it smaller than the USS Gerald Ford Class, which is 1,092 feet long and 1,106 feet wide.

The Fujian has three electromagnetic catapults, per Defense News, one fewer than the USS Gerald Ford Class, per Naval News.

In terms of aircraft capacity, Fujian can take on about 60 aircraft, while the largest US carriers can host about 75, per estimates by the CSIS, cited by CNN.

Business Insider previously reported that China's two other aircraft carriers — the Liaoning and Shandong — had outdated Soviet-era designs and smaller air wings, making them notably inferior to US carriers.

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• Charges were filed in the disappearance of Mint Butterfield, naming a second person.
• Butterfield was found after six days of missing in San Francisco.
• The teen was coerced into running away by two adults, prosecutors say.

A second person is facing charges over the disappearance of Mint Butterfield, the teen child of two tech founders.

Butterfield, 16, went missing for six days before they were found alive in the back of a white van in San Francisco's Tenderloin district on Saturday.

They are the only child of Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, who cofounded Flickr together in 2004. Stewart Butterfield also cofounded Slack and is worth around $1.6 billion, according to Forbes.

The van belonged to Christopher "Kio" Dizefalo, 26, a San Francisco parking valet described as an "adult friend" of Butterfield's in a press release from the Marin County Sheriff's Office.

But later, when Dizefalo was charged, prosecutors named a second person, a woman called Sarah Atkins.

Both were charged with child abduction and the lesser count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Both are due to appear in court on Wednesday morning.

When Butterfield was missing, authorities said they believed they went willingly.

(The charge doesn't necessarily contradict that — it is still possible to meet the definition of abduction for a willing child.)

The sheriff's office also said Dizefalo was arrested in connection with a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse.

It appeared in his inmate record for the Marin County Jail but not as a formal charge in the court records.

Atkins didn't appear as an inmate in jail records.

Dizefalo and Butterfield "had some sort of a quasi-dating relationship," a representative for the Marin County Sheriff's Office told The New York Post.

Atkins is in her late 20s, according to The San Francisco Standard. There is little other information available about her alleged involvement or relationship with Butterfield.

Dizefalo was taken into custody shortly after Butterfield was discovered by police, and his bail was set at $50,000.

Adam Schermerhorn, a representative for Marin County Sheriff's Office, told The Standard that Atkins was not there when Butterfield and Dizefalo were found.

Butterfield's parents thanked "family, friends, volunteers and strangers who called in tips and made this recovery possible," in a joint statement obtained by the Standard.

"We especially want to thank the seasoned law enforcement officers who understand the very real threat of predators who use the allure of drugs to groom teenagers," they added.

The Marin County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on Wednesday, sent outside regular business hours.

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• Dozens of arrests have reportedly been made at Columbia University after NYPD cleared protesters.
• Pro-Palestinian protesters had barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, a main campus building.
• Arrests were also made at the City College of New York, reports said.

More than 100 people were arrested at Columbia University and the City College of New York on Tuesday, multiple news organizations reported.

The arrests followed a student occupation of Hamilton Hall, one of Columbia University's main campus buildings.

Columbia has been rocked by protests over the Israel-Hamas war, following Hamas' October 7 terror attack.

NYPD in riot gear were called to clear the protesters

On Tuesday evening, NYPD officers in riot gear reportedly entered Hamilton Hall, where protesters had been camping out for around 20 hours.

CNN reported that the NYPD said its officers used loud distraction devices, "flash-bang grenades" to disperse the protesters who had barricaded themselves in the building.

A law enforcement official told CNN that more than 100 arrests were made at Columbia and the City College of New York. Business Insider has contacted the NYPD to try to confirm the number of arrests.

Columbia's president, Nemat "Minouche" Shafik released a letter to the NYPD on Tuesday, which requested that police remain on the campus until May 17, two days after the graduation ceremony.

"The takeover of Hamilton Hall and the continued encampments raise serious safety concerns for the individuals involved and the entire community," part of the letter read.

Protests have also occurred at other campuses. In Los Angeles, police were called to the UCLA campus early Wednesday after violence broke out when counter-protesters tried to tear down barricades at the pro-Palestinian encampment, the LA Times reported.

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• Tesla is reportedly gutting its EV charging team, laying off around 500 employees.
• The news sent shockwaves through the industry, with one supplier calling it a "kick in the pants."
• Tesla dominates EV charging in the US, with many of its rivals switching to its charging network.

Elon Musk has gone "hardcore" again — and it's sending tremors through the EV industry.

The Information reported late Monday that Musk is laying off around 500 employees on its Supercharger team in a move that one supplier has described as a "sharp kick in the pants." The team is responsible for building its global network of superfast EV chargers.

"As contractors for the Supercharger network, my team woke up to a sharp kick in the pants this morning," Andres Pinter, co-CEO of Bullet EV Charging Solutions, an Austin-based EV chargepoint installer that works on Tesla's network, told Reuters.

"Tesla has already been awarded money under the federal government's NEVI program. There's no way Mr. Musk would walk away from effectively free money. It may be possible Mr. Musk will reconstitute the EV charger team in a bigger, badder, more Muskian way," he added.

The shock job cuts have reverberated across the auto industry, with many of Tesla's rivals backing the company's charging network by making their EVs compatible with Tesla's Superchargers in recent months.

Executives at EV startup Rivian, which recently said its drivers would be able to use Tesla's network, were left confused and concerned by the job cuts, a source told Bloomberg.

Over the past few years, Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) has become the dominant charging network in the US, with the company installing 15,000 Superfast charging stalls across the country as of 2024.

Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis announced they will make their EVs compatible with NACS in the past year.

Business Insider approached Rivian, Ford, and GM for comment but didn't immediately hear back.

In an email to senior executives at Tesla on Monday, Musk announced the departure of two executives: Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of the company's Supercharger group, and Daniel Ho, head of new products, per The Information. He also castigated executives for not being "hard core" enough in cutting headcount.

Last month, Tesla laid off over 10% of its global workforce.

Tesla shares dropped early Tuesday as investors reacted to the news. Musk, meanwhile, sought to reassure owners and suppliers by stating that Tesla still plans to grow its Supercharger network, just at a slower pace than before.

However, there are signs that the company is cutting back on new Superchargers. The EV maker reportedly canceled four planned Supercharger sites in New York on Tuesday, according to InsiderEVs.

William Navarro Jameson, who worked as Tesla's Charging Program Lead confirmed he was laid off in a post on LinkedIn.,

He wrote on X that the layoffs offered a "unique opportunity" for others looking to challenge Tesla's charging stranglehold.

"If Tesla is yielding the charging crown, who will step up?" he said.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.

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• Hacker Aleksanteri 'Julius' Kivimäki was sentenced to over six years in prison.
• He was found guilty of hacking a therapy company to steal notes and blackmail thousands of patients.
• The case was described by the Finnish court as the 'largest ever' in the Nordic country.

A Finnish hacker has been sentenced to six years and three months in prison after he was found guilty of stealing confidential therapy notes to blackmail thousands of patients.

The District Court of Western Uusimaa announced the sentencing of Aleksanteri "Julius" Kivimäki on Monday.

The judges found the 26-year-old guilty of all counts, which included 9,231 counts of disseminating information violating personal privacy and 20,745 counts of attempted aggravated extortion.

He was charged last October, after being extradited from France to Finland.

According to BBC News, Kivimäki targeted around 33,000 people.

In a bulletin published by Finland's judiciary system, the court said that the Vastaamo private psychotherapy service, which operated therapy centers across Finland, was hacked in November 2018.

The company's patient database was then illegally copied, it said.

According to BBC News, Kivimäki demanded a ransom of more than 400,000 euros, or $426,818, from the therapy company in 2020.

The Associated Press reported that the demand was higher — 450,000 euros, or about $480,000, to be paid using bitcoin.

When the company refused to comply, Kivimäki emailed thousands of patients asking them all for 200 euros, or $213, while threatening to publish their confidential therapy notes and personal details online if they didn't pay up, BBC News reported.

According to AP, he said the ransom would increase to 500 euros, or $534, in bitcoin if it wasn't paid within 24 hours.

A trove of confidential information then surfaced on the dark web, including patients' personal details, Social Security numbers, and sensitive therapist and doctor notes from sessions.

One man told WIRED that information discussed with his therapist about his abusive parents and drug and alcohol use was leaked online.

The BBC noted that at least one suicide has been linked to the case.

Kivimäki denied all the charges, but the legal bulletin cited evidence presented in the trial appearing to show his involvement.

For example, he had used a pseudonym to comment on the hacking and extortion in an online message board.

The court also found that Kivimäki had used a server implicated in the crimes more extensively than he had admitted in the trial, and used an encryption key and IP address in a way he had denied in his testimony.

The court also cited a payment of 0.1 bitcoin made by the National Bureau of Investigation in 2020 that appeared to reach Kivimäki.

"The quality of the crime was exceptional, and due to the number of parties involved, it was the largest ever in our country," the bulletin said.

The court proceedings have yet to address compensation claims for the victims.

Brunswick, an international public relations firm, said that healthcare data is disproportionally susceptible to extortion.

A 2019 study in the Studies in Health Technology and Informatics journal outlined how healthcare data is particularly valuable to cybercriminals because it can contain financial and personal information that can be used for blackmail and fraudulent purposes.

According to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, over 40 million people in the US were affected by healthcare data breaches in 2021.

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• A Russian zoo said it sent two peacocks to those fighting in Ukraine.
• It said it wanted to "brighten up soldiers' everyday life in combat."
• But it then deleted the post, saying comments were insulting Putin.

A Russian zoo said it sent two peacocks to Ukraine with the aim of inspiring Russian troops fighting there — but then deleted its post after people mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin in the comments, according to reports.

The Lipetsk Zoo, in southwest Russia, announced the move on social media website VK on Tuesday.

It wrote: "For guys in difficult combat situations, the beauty of birds inspires and brings a piece of joy. This is not an advertisement for the zoo, but a gift from the heart. We hope that the beauty of these birds will brighten up soldiers' everyday life in combat," The Daily Beast reported.

It also shared a video of a masked soldier in front of an enclosure with the two birds.

The soldier said that every soldier would be able to look at the birds and get some "spiritual peace," according to The Daily Beast's translation.

He added that an aviary was being built for the birds, according to Ukrainian outlet Pravda's reporting.

It's unclear if the video was filmed in Ukraine. It's also not clear where the birds were sent, or how close to the fighting they had been.

The zoo later deleted its announcement post, according to The Daily Beast and Pravda.

It told Russian news outlet Rise that comments were left that insulted Putin.

The zoo blamed Ukrainian bots for the comments — a common excuse that Russia gives for online comments that insult Putin or criticize Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

It said that "insults against the president are unacceptable," per The Daily Beast.

Some commentators were confused by the move, with one writing, according to The Daily Beast: "What are peacocks going to do there?"

Russia has heavily restricted information that its citizens can get about the war, and has punished Russians who speak out against it, leading to little visible dissent in the country.

While some protests have taken place, with thousands of people arrested, Russian citizens have largely not been seen to oppose the invasion.

Putin has also put in place a law that effectively criminalizes any reference to the fighting in Ukraine being a "war" or "invasion."

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• Microsoft's OpenAI investment may have been prompted by concerns over Google's AI progress.
• In a 2019 email, a Microsoft exec said he was "very, very worried" about Google's AI capabilities.
• The emails were made public as part of the DoJ's antitrust case against Google.

In 2019, Microsoft became "very, very worried" about Google's AI capabilities, newly unearthed emails show, and that may have been what spurred it to invest in OpenAI.

In one lengthy email, Microsoft's chief technology officer Kevin Scott told Satya Nadella and Bill Gates that Google's AI-powered "auto-complete in Gmail" was "getting scarily good."

He added that Microsoft was "multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML [machine learning] scale."

The emails, which had the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," were made public on Tuesday as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google. A large section of Scott's email was redacted.

In response, Microsoft CEO Nadella said the email highlighted "why I want us to do this" and copied Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood into the chain.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

In 2019, Microsoft made an initial $1 billion investment into its now multi-billion partnership with OpenAI.

Microsoft has since benefited from its well-timed investment.

After public and investor interest in AI surged post-ChatGPT, Microsoft was able to move quickly, incorporating OpenAI's buzzy tech into existing products like Bing and Microsoft 365.

The speed at which Microsoft released AI products even left some wondering whether arch-rival Google had been left behind.

Google, a pioneer of AI technology, has been trying to counter the narrative that it has fallen behind Microsoft ever since. The company released several products to compete with OpenAI's releases, including Bard, an AI-powered chatbot, and an AI model called Gemini.

The 2019 email exchanges also show how Microsoft was keeping tabs on its rivals, with Scott noting that the scale of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain's AI ambitions were "interesting." Among some of the mentions of what its competitors were doing, Scott mentioned Google's data center designs and distributed systems architecture.

Discussing Microsoft's AI talent, Scott said it had "very smart" people with machine learning expertise in its Bing, vision, and speech team. He added that the teams faced constraints on scaling up their ambitions, which suggests why it saw potential in partnering with OpenAI to bring its AI aspirations to fruition.

Scott added that when Open AI, Deep Mind and Google Brain were competing to see who could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, he was "highly dismissive of their efforts," but "that was a mistake."

Read the unredacted portions of the emails below. RL refers to reinforcement learning, NLP is natural language processing, and BERT is bidirectional encoder representations from transformers.

From: Kevin Scott
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2019 7:16:11 AM
To: Satya Nadella; Bill Gates
Subject: Re: Thoughts on OpenAI

[Redacted]

The thing that's interesting about what Open AI and Deep Mind and Google Brain are doing is the scale of their ambition, and how that ambition is driving everything from datacenter design to compute silicon to networks and distributed systems architectures to numerical optimizers, compiler, programming frameworks, and the high level abstractions that model developers have at their disposal. When all these programs were doing was competing with one another to see which RL system could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, I has highly dismissive of their efforts. That was a mistake. When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build NLP models that we couldn't easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously. And as I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.

Turns out, just replicating BERT-large wasn't easy to do for us. Even though we had the template for the model, it took us ~6 months to get the model trained because our infrastructure wasn't up to the task. Google had BERT for at least six months prior to that, so in the time that it took us to hack together the capability to train a 340M parameter model, they had a year to figure out how to get it into production and to move on to larger scale, more interesting models. We are already seeing the results of that work in our competitive analysis of their products. One of the Q&A competitive metrics that we watch just jumped by 10 percentage points on Google Search because of BERT-like models. Their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good.

[Redacted]

We have very smart ML people in Bind, in the vision team, and in the speech team. But the core deep learning teams within each of these bigger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been constrained, which means that even as we start to feed them resources, they still have to go through a learning process to scale up. And we are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.

[Redacted]

From: Satya Nadella
To: Kevin Scott
CC: Amy Hood Sent: 6/12/2019 6:02:47 PM
Subject: Re: Thoughts on OpenAI

Very good email that explains, why I want us to do this… and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute.

Amy – fyi

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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