• Law firms can't stop lawyers from tinkering with chatbots, so they're adding hallucination detectors.
• Tools like Clearbrief scan legal drafts for the fake cases and facts that AI tools sometimes invent.
• Courts are catching more bogus citations in legal filings every day.

Law firm Cozen O'Connor has a rule against using publicly available chatbots to draft legal filings. But after a judge penalized two of its lawyers for citing fake cases, the firm is adding some extra protection: an AI hallucination detector.

Cozen O'Connor is now testing software, made by a startup called Clearbrief, that scans legal briefs for made-up facts and produces a report. Think spell-check, except instead of flagging typos, it spots the fictional cases and citations that generative tools sometimes invent.

"You have to be pragmatic," said Kristina Bakardjiev, the Cozen O'Connor partner tasked with harnessing technology to serve lawyers and their clients. She said lawyers will play around with chatbots whether the tools are authorized or not.

Stung by embarrassing AI hallucinations, the legal field has adopted bans on general-use chatbots and AI assistants. But it's hard to stop a curious associate from pasting a draft into a free, browser-based chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Now law firms and legal tech companies are scrambling to lower the risk of bogus citations and catch those that sneak through before they land in front of a judge.

Two of Cozen O'Connor's defense lawyers in September admitted they had filed a document riddled with fake cases after one of them used ChatGPT to draft it, against firm policy. A Nevada district court judge gave the firm a choice: remove the lawyers from the case and pay $2,500 in sanctions each, or have the pair write to their former law school deans and bar authorities explaining the fiasco and offering to speak in seminars on topics like "professional conduct."

Both lawyers went with option No. 2. Cozen also fired the lawyer who had used ChatGPT.

Earlier this year, Damien Charlotin, a legal data analyst and consultant, began tracking cases in which a court had discovered hallucinated content in a legal filing. Charlotin tallied 120 cases between April 2023 and May 2025. By December, his count had hit 660, with the rate of new cases accelerating to four or five per day.

The number of documented cases remains small relative to the total volume of legal filings, Charlotin said. Most cases in his database involved self-represented litigants or lawyers from small or solo firms. When large firms were involved, the hallucinations often slipped in through the work of junior staff, paralegals, experts, or consultants, or through processes like formatting footnotes, Charlotin said.

Hallucinated content is causing headaches in other professions, too. In October, consulting firm Deloitte agreed to pay a partial refund to the Australian government for a $290,000 report after officials found it was peppered with allegedly AI-generated errors.

Straying from the walled garden

AI hallucinations are hard to eliminate because they're baked into the way chatbots work. Large language models are trained to predict the word that is most likely to come next, given the words before it.

Michael Dahn, a senior vice president at Thomson Reuters who leads global product teams for legal-research service Westlaw, says the model makers can't get hallucinations to zero for answering open-ended questions about the world. However, companies can dramatically reduce their risk by forcing a large language model to cite from a specific data set, like a corpus of case law and treatises. The model can still mismatch or overlook content, but wholesale fabrications are far less likely.

Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis are selling that promise to customers: that an artificial assistant confined to their walled gardens of vetted material is safer than a chatbot trained on the open internet. Both companies have spent decades and heaps of money building deep repositories of case law and other legal content. More recently, they've bolted on AI-powered tools to help lawyers search and cite their data. They now have to defend their positions against services like ChatGPT and Claude that are creeping into the legal field.

LexisNexis has also extended its moat to Harvey, the legal tech startup whose valuation has climbed to $8 billion. Harvey struck a partnership with LexisNexis this year that pipes one of the world's biggest legal databases into Harvey's generative tools.

Harvey also works with AI model providers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, to constrain which datasets they're allowed to draw from and layer in Harvey's own proprietary datasets, a spokesperson said. Lawyers can then inspect logs that show how an answer was reached and what data fed into it.

An AI fact-checker

Clearbrief makes a drafting tool for litigators that works as a Microsoft Word plug-in. Jacqueline Schafer, a former litigator who founded Clearbrief, says its product detects citations using natural language processing, and creates links to the relevant case law or documents from the case. The tool calls out citations and facts that are fabricated or contain typos. The tool also points to places where the underlying source doesn't quite support what the writer claims.

Cozen O'Connor has been testing a new Clearbrief feature that lets users generate a cite-check report before passing a draft to a partner or filing it in court.

Schafer says partners at large firms trust their junior staff to check citations rather than vetting every case themselves. Still, federal rules hold the partners who sign filings personally responsible for their accuracy.

Part of Clearbrief's appeal for Cozen O'Connor is the paper trail. The firm is upgrading its knowledge management system, and Bakardjiev imagines that someday the firm might store cite-check reports alongside drafts and final filings, creating a chain of custody for every brief.

If a judge ever asks what a partner did to prevent hallucinated citations, Bakardjiev said, partners can point to a report that shows who ran the check and when.

The legal world is likely to live with hallucinations for a long time. The unglamorous part of the solution is training lawyers to treat the chatbot output as a starting point, not the finished work. The other answer: throwing more AI at the AI.

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Brick-and-mortar business has long been the foundation of real estate — figuratively and literally. But as the industry adapts to new technologies and rapidly changing market conditions, new leaders are stepping in to meet unique new challenges.

Each year, Business Insider highlights up-and-coming agents, architects, founders, and other figures making an outsize impact in real estate. The process starts with nominations from CEOs, company presidents, and managing partners. To be considered, nominees must be US-based, under 40, and stand out from their peers. Business Insider's editors make the final selections.

This year's class of rising stars comes from a wide array of backgrounds, with prior expertise in everything from construction and marketing to private equity. From making real estate investing more attainable to developing 500-square-foot homes to fit in your backyard, they're addressing some of the industry's biggest challenges head-on.

Meet Business Insider's 18 Rising Stars of Real Estate for 2025.

Tarek Afifi, 28

Corporate finance and investor relations manager, Better Home & Finance

Tarek Afifi said his secret to success is his deep belief in the American dream.

The 28-year-old, who serves as the corporate finance and investor relations manager at Better Home & Finance, said he gets satisfaction from shaping investors' perception of the online mortgage lender — and helping the company's hard work get reflected in its stock price.

He attributes his success to how deeply he believes in Better's mission, and said the idea of helping Americans buy a home brings him satisfaction.

"Everyone wants to own equity in a home that they can live in, but also, build wealth off of," he said. "What really attracted me to it, I think, is the fact that it really is applicable to all walks of life," he said of buying a home.

Better shares have soared more than 400% since April of last year, around the time Afifi joined the company. That's due to investor optimism on the company's future earnings growth, as well as a surge of interest in the stock after the hedge funder Eric Jackson made a high-profile bet on the company.

Better reported a net loss of $27 million in the second quarter, down from a $40 million net loss in the first quarter. Its funded loan volume for the quarter also rose to $1.2 billion, up 38% for the quarter.

Afifi is optimistic about the direction of the residential real estate market over the next year. He expects refinance and mortgage activity to bloom in 2026 as the Fed continues to cut interest rates.

"Everyone's kind of positioning themselves for the refi rally," he said. "So it's a symbiotic relationship and I think that it's something we're all looking forward to seeing."

Maria Barrios, 35

Executive director of operations and CFO, The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals

The rate of Hispanic homeownership rose to a record 49.5% in 2023. Maria Barrios wants to make that statistic even higher.

As the executive director of operations and chief financial officer of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP), Barrios is central to the nonprofit's mission to promote homeownership and expand access to credit in the Hispanic community through education and advocacy. As of 2025, the organization has 85 chapters nationwide, with an additional 30 in development and nearly 58,000 active members.

"While our mission is to promote sustainable Hispanic homeownership, we're about much more than that," Barrios told Business Insider. "We understand that homeownership isn't the end goal for Hispanics; it's just the beginning of their financial journey."

Barrios has played a key role in expanding the organization's reach, assisting with the launch of the AVANCE Global Conference, a business and media platform, and expanding internationally with AVANCE España in January 2026. She also supported the launch of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance (NHCA) and AVANCE Sports.

Overall, Barrios has driven consistent 30% year-over-year revenue growth for the organization and helped launch an average of 10 new NAHREP chapters annually.

"The real estate industry faced a challenging market this year, but our biggest accomplishment was growing despite these difficulties," Barrios said.

Derek Fitzgerald, 33

Senior vice president of operations, McCarthy

Derek Fitzgerald is the poster child for company loyalty. He's been at McCarthy, a national commercial construction company, since he left college 12 years ago, climbing the ranks to become the senior vice president of operations for the builder's San Francisco office.

It's a career he came to after finding a passion for the "built environment" while studying civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley.

Since then, Fitzgerald has been part of a wide range of projects, from the renovation of a 350,000-square-foot naval hangar to the construction of a lab that produced the antiviral drug Remdesivir. The work is varied, and marries his varied set of skills.

"I didn't necessarily want to focus on the design part of it," Fitzgerald said. "But I found this commercial real estate and construction environment that allowed me to merge my technical background with this passion that I have for people and bringing people together."

Nick Friedman, 29

President of home equity, HomeLight

For most founders, selling their company marks the end of a journey. For Nick Friedman, it was the beginning of another chapter.

Friedman's first chapter began at 19, when he dropped out of Williams College and set out to start a company that would "change the world." After joining the famed Y Combinator program with Adam Pollack, the two launched lending startup Accept.inc in 2019. In 2022, they sold the company to the real estate technology company HomeLight.

A lot of founders would've ridden into the sunset. Friedman stayed on board.

"I think that I told the CEO of HomeLight, 'I'm probably going to be your worst employee of all time,'" Friedman told Business Insider. "I am not going to listen to you. I'm going to want to do my own thing. I'm going to want to figure out how to grow this thing on my own. That's just who I am. And I don't think I'm going to last very long."

Three years later, he's HomeLight's president of home equity, overseeing sales, operations, products, and compliance with everything associated with HomeLight's core lending product, Buy Before You Sell, which allows users to purchase their next home before selling their existing one.

Friedman describes himself as an old soul, and said his willingness to get out and talk to people — instead of relying on social media or sending emails — has helped him connect with the right people and grow his career.

"We're not shy," he said. "I think the reason a lot of younger founders today don't make it is because they are very shy."

Joey Gumataotao, 28

Cofounder and COO, Mogul Club

Real estate investment is often considered the easiest way to gain wealth in the US. But high barriers to entry prevent unseasoned investors or people with less capital from getting started.

Fractional real-estate investing, which allows people to invest in a portion of property instead of buying it outright, makes it easier for non-accredited investors to get started — a fact Mogul Club cofounder Joey Gumataotao recognized early on.

"My partner and I actually purchased our home right out of college with what very, very little savings we had from jobs that we worked in college and ended up renting out two of our bedrooms to two of my colleagues at Goldman," Gumataotao told BI. "This is a real way to build wealth that wasn't there before."

Gumataotao started Mogul Club in 2022 alongside his cofounder Alex Blackwood, who he met while they were both working at Goldman Sachs. Blackwood was on the investment banking side, and Gumataotao was in real-estate investing on the private equity side.

They both wanted to make real-estate investing more accessible to everyone.

"Even as someone who was working for a large institution, I actually didn't have a ton of opportunity to invest in these lucrative multifamily, large multimillion-dollar investments myself," Gumataotao said.

Mogul Club allows investors from all financial backgrounds to invest as little as $250 toward a property in markets like Mesa, Arizona, or Ramsey, New Jersey.

As COO, Gumataotao still handles people management and fundraising responsibilities — Mogul Club is still in its seed-extension round — but he also gets his hands dirty working on the acquisition and supply side of the business.

"No matter how much we grow, I'll always prefer to be hands-on," he said. "Real estate's my passion."

Zoe Heyman, 31

Vice president of investor relations, Basis

Zoe Heyman's role at Basis defies a simple job description. As vice president of investor relations at Basis, a commercial real estate investment firm, the 31-year-old oversees all marketing and investor communications, leads the publication of the company's annual Corporate Responsibility Report, and recently spearheaded the implementation of new technology to better track deals and streamline operations across the company.

Her efforts aren't solely focused on the company's bottom line. As a leader on the People, Planet, Policy Committee, Heyman also organizes environmental-justice fundraisers and community cleanup activities for the firm's employees. Through her involvement in Basis' Capital Connect Initiative, Heyman also works to promote minority-led institutions and direct capital to underserved communities.

"Zoe Heyman brings a fresh perspective, a modern approach, and an unparalleled level of resourcefulness and initiative to her leadership role," said Leigh Roumila, head of investor relations at Basis.

Jed Miciak, 35

Senior vice president, revenue & marketing, Landing

Only two-and-a-half years into working in residential real estate, Jed Miciak knows it's his calling.

Miciak is the senior vice president of marketing and revenue at Landing, a company that provides a collection of furnished apartments for shorter-term rentals. It's a job with some similarities to the decade he spent working at Hilton, where he helped grow the data analytics team and worked in global pricing.

This year, Miciak has helped grow Landing's portfolio of properties to about 500 nationally, up from 100 last year. He's also built AI models that use machine learning to identify potential problems, launched Landing's rebrand, and grown the company's online travel agency business while working with companies like Airbnb and Marriott.

Over the next year, Miciak hopes to continue to grow supply and drive marketing efficiency higher — in addition to working toward an IPO down the line. He's motivated by all he's learned from being in the room with longtime real estate pros.

"I was able to be in these rooms with executives who have been in the space for a long time," Miciak said. "I sat there and provided data at the time; it didn't really seem that valuable for my career. Now, looking back, seeing how these executives face the tough problems solves a lot of the issues running this global powerhouse. It's super helpful."

James Murray, 35

Director of design, Samara

James Murray is tackling one of architecture's most challenging tasks: designing small spaces that are functional and stylish.

Murray is the director of design at Samara, a modular startup spun out of Airbnb's research and development team. The California-based company's first product, Backyard, is an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU — a compact backyard home that can serve as an in-law suite, home office, or short-term rental.

Samara is growing at a pivotal moment in real estate, as high housing costs prompt many homeowners across the country to stay put and find creative ways to expand their living space.

"ADU is an acronym that's been spreading across the US for some time, but in California specifically, it's become a very common type of home, one that's now almost ubiquitous as a solution for many people," Murray told Business Insider.

Samara offers a suite of backyard ADUs, ranging from compact studios to XL models, measuring between 420 and 950 square feet. For each design, Murray applies a philosophy he calls "empathetic affordances" — the idea of creating spaces that respond to how people actually live and move through them.

"We're always aware of how we engage in a space," Murray said. "Think about the size of a dining table or a bed in a bedroom. It's also about the right balance of space in that perfect kitchen triangle, where you can cook a meal while staying close to the refrigerator, stovetop, and sink."

Murray's thoughtful designs have been integral to the company's success, helping Samara book more than $100 million in project value in California over the past year.

Griffin O'Brien, 31

CEO and cofounder, Estate Media

With the abundance of TikToks and Instagram Reels showcasing listings and giving homeownership advice, it's not hard to see the connection between real estate professionals and content creators today.

But when Griffin O'Brien launched his real-estate media company Estate Media in 2023, it took some time to convince others it was a good idea for a business.

"There was absolutely a challenge from day one," O'Brien told Business Insider of convincing major realtors and talent that being featured in Estate's content would be good for their brands and businesses.

O'Brien, whose background in media spans consulting for Snapchat and working in content acquisition at Roku and Amazon's Prime Video, founded Estate Media with Andrew Shanfeld and "Million Dollar Listing" star Josh Flagg as a consulting firm, talent agency, and content-creation machine with a talent-focused approach to creating original content for the real estate industry.

O'Brien said that Estate Media reaches close to 35 million people through its podcasts, newsletters, and shows on a number of social media platforms.

"We really did see an opportunity between the traditional publications — largely news-based publications — covering real estate and reality television to create content right around these leading voices," O'Brien said.

Michael O'Connor, 30

Cofounder of The Exclusive Group at Douglas Elliman

Michael O'Connor has worked nonstop in real estate since he was 21. He has no intentions of changing that.

O'Connor started in luxury real estate with Douglas Elliman, where he's been for nearly a decade. Now a sales associate for The Exclusive Group, a boutique real estate advisory group under Douglas Elliman, O'Connor specializes in South Florida luxury real estate, selling over $1 billion in properties alongside his business partner Nicholas Malinosky. The group was ranked number one in Florida and number two in the country for sales volume for medium-sized teams by The Wall Street Journal.

"That right there goes to show how hard we work for our clients and production," O'Connor said. "That's definitely the greatest accomplishment over any one particular sale."

One of O'Connor's proudest transactions was for two contiguous oceanfront lots in Delray Beach that sold for a combined $44 million. He and Malinosky have done about 30 transactions a year, though they prioritize sales volume.

Because many of the buyers and sellers O'Connor works with are "extremely sophisticated" and "typically the best at what they do," they want someone who will go above and beyond in guiding them through the process.

"The phone is always going and you're always getting emails, so it starts early and it goes late," O'Connor said.

Alexander Redfearn, 36

Founder, president, and CEO, Redfearn Capital

There was a time when Alex Redfearn thought things wouldn't work out.

In 2014, at the age of 25, he launched Redfearn Capital, a private equity firm specializing in commercial real estate, based in South Florida. At the time, he had no experience beyond a college case study he completed at his alma mater, the University of Miami.

Redfearn told Business Insider that during the early years of building his business, he often considered walking away and starting over.

"I almost quit after the third year," he said. "I tried to, but my wife wouldn't let me. I wanted to get a cabin and move to New York, but we stuck it out."

Turns out, his wife was right. Since founding the company, Redfearn has built a portfolio exceeding $800 million in assets under management, spanning industrial real estate including small-bay, manufacturing, and logistics warehouses. Despite challenging economic conditions, such as tighter lending standards and higher interest rates, his firm continues to grow. In 2024, the company acquired 13 properties, generating a total revenue of $125 million.

Reflecting on his career, Redfearn said his company's success comes down to persistence — a quality he believes is essential for every young real estate entrepreneur.

"Do what you say you're going to do," Redfearn said. "I think in my line of business, people often commit to something but don't always follow through. Success really comes down to doing what you said you were going to do."

Alexis Xavier Rivas, 32

Cofounder and CEO, Cover

Alexis Rivas believed traditional homebuilding methods were outdated and sought to build homes with the same precision, speed, and cost efficiency as vehicles.

So in 2014, while still in school, Rivas and his fellow Cooper Union classmate Jemuel Joseph co-founded Cover, a prefab homebuilding company. In 2018, they designed and constructed their first accessory dwelling unit (ADU) — a compact, 500-square-foot, customizable backyard home.

"There's a huge housing shortage in the United States, and the problem is getting worse," Rivas told Business Insider. "Our approach to solving this is by building homes in a factory with the same repeatability, quality, and scale as cars."

Los Angeles-based Cover handles the permitting, design, and engineering process for its customers. Like automobile manufacturing, the company produces every component — from framing to doors and windows — on automotive-style production lines in its factory before assembling the home on-site. The production and installation process of their steel homes, which range from 150 to 1,200 square feet, typically takes 1-2 months, depending on size.

In 2025, Cover expanded into full-size custom homes, and in October, it announced it was nearing completion of a rebuild of a house destroyed in the Pacific Palisades fires.

"Cover was always more than a backyard home company," Rivas said. "Expanding to full homes feels like our original ambition becoming visible."

JJ Rivers, 34

Principal studio director, Gensler

A rural farm town in Northwest New Jersey might not be where you'd expect to find the architect responsible for some of the most exciting projects on the East Coast. But in Gensler's case, that's where they found JJ Rivers.

Rivers, who has already notched 10 years at global architecture firm Gensler at age 34, had an early appreciation for how things are built.

"I come from a pretty blue-collar family, so I've got a lot of aunts and uncles in different trades," Rivers told Business Insider. "Growing up, I always had my hands on building things, whether it was at my childhood home or at my relative's home."

Today, he's a principal and studio director in Gensler's DC office, and he also runs mixed-use development for the Southeast region. He manages a team of about 60 people, so his fingerprints are all over a number of projects on the East Coast, like Under Armour's new global headquarters in Baltimore.

Because of the diverse differences in architecture up and down the coast, Rivers is always encountering new challenges. Not that he minds.

"It just provides you different opportunities," he said.

Luke Robinson, 34

North America regional president, WeWork

A lot has changed since Luke Robinson joined WeWork more than a decade ago, when the coworking firm was in startup mode and had only a handful of buildings.

Overseeing the firm's sales, Robinson helped launch and scale WeWork's enterprise business, a major component of its growth over the years. Later, when COVID-19 and the work-from-home trend upended the commercial real estate market, he also led the charge to help its businesses bounce back in New York.

Robinson told Business Insider that being as transparent as possible with clients during difficult times has been key.

"We saw all the extremes. We saw people come back immediately. We saw people fully go remote," he said of the pandemic. "We were able to, number one, hopefully provide solutions, but also provide some perspective."

Robinson, who is now WeWork's regional president of North America, said the firm's recent restructuring to slash its $4 billion debt has been challenging.

"Everything, to a degree, is challenging about that process. I really made a huge effort to be extremely transparent with our landlords and our members throughout the whole process."

Robinson said he expects the commercial real estate market to pick up steam next year as the RTO push continues, and he's focused on continuing the company's efforts to refresh its properties and widen its offerings to customers.

"We've talked about return to office for five years at this point," he said. "I feel very confident in saying that this phase over the past year has been by far the strongest."

Amy Rossetti, 32

Founder, R[AR]E Public Relations

Launching a small business at 27 during the pandemic would have been a risk for anyone, but Amy Rossetti was confident that the strong relationships she built wouldn't fail her. Now, after celebrating her company's fifth anniversary, she's planning for many more years of success.

Rossetti's company, R[AR]E Public Relations, is a boutique agency with a five-person staff that handles the public relations needs of 22 real estate clients. Since launching in Beverly Hills in 2020, the company has opened a New York office, and Rossetti plans to establish a bigger presence in South Florida and potentially international markets in 2026.

Though Rossetti's clientele is mainly focused around the luxury real estate market, R[AR]E has opened its services to all who need them — from architects to investors to startups.

"I'm really adamant that I think R[AR]E can be and will be, if it's not too bold to say, the No. 1 real estate PR firm in the country within the next five years," she said. "That's what I'm gunning for."

Erik Rutter, 33

Managing partner, Oak Row Equities

Erik Rutter cofounded the real estate development firm Oak Row Equities with every intention of dividing his efforts between Miami and his hometown of New York City. Almost eight years after the 2018 launch, though, he and his firm remain laser-focused on South Florida.

That choice has proven to be a winning strategy. With Rutter and his cofounder, David Weitz, at the helm, the company has amassed a $3.9 billion portfolio of office, retail, and multifamily space, luring big-name tenants such as Spotify and Amazon along the way.

Rutter, 33, started the company with the firm belief that South Florida's quality of life would eventually draw a wave of top employers, who in turn would demand top-tier office space and ample housing for their workers. The COVID-19 pandemic "certainly accelerated our thesis," Rutter said, but he still sees plenty of runway.

"We're continuing to see great firms take large swaths of space in the Miami market," Rutter said. "And that's not really slowing down."

Erica Sachse, 33

Cofounder, Powered by Development Marketing Team

Erica Sachse was on a founding spree early in her career.

After spending five years in Australia, Sachse noticed that the US real estate market was lagging in its adoption of technology. She set out to fix that.

"Australia is very far ahead in the utilization of technology and 21st-century marketing techniques for real estate," she said. "I learned how to harness the data being created in the digital space for high-quality lead generation, ultra-targeted campaigns, lead nurture, really strong automation, and data profiling for prospective buyers and renters."

She founded the property marketing company Snaplistings at the end of 2019, then started her own marketing and sales brokerage, Powered by DMT, in 2021.

Being ahead of the curve has its benefits.

"Our clients are just so happy to finally be able to make data-driven decisions," Sachse said. "That's really what our focus is and what my passion is."

Sofia Zavala, 31

Senior associate, Pickard Chilton

Raised in Paraguay, Sofia Zavala developed an early passion for art and design, as well as a clear sense of their socioecological impact on daily life. This perspective now guides her architectural work.

Zavala specializes in large-scale urban projects, and her portfolio encompasses a range of interior corporate work in New York, as well as mixed-use, corporate, and commercial developments across San Francisco and Texas.

"Large-scale projects have a big impact on the cities they're in," Zavala told Business Insider. "I'm involved in a couple of projects in San Francisco and in Texas, and they're all meant to make a meaningful difference in communities and create beautiful spaces for people to engage."

Zavala is currently a senior associate at Connecticut-based Pickard Chilton. She's the architectural firm's youngest employee at that rank and the youngest woman on its senior leadership team.

"I'm very proud of that and grateful for the confidence that the firm has placed in me," Zavala said. "Being in this role motivates me to keep raising the bar and to support younger designers as they grow into leadership roles and find their own voice."

Zavala has plenty to be proud of. In 2024, she was a project designer on 530 Howard, an 840-foot luxury residential tower in San Francisco — the city's largest residential building. In 2025, she will also serve as the design team leader for the recently announced Ritz-Carlton Houston, which is projected to be the downtown area's second-tallest building at more than 600 feet.

"The most rewarding part of my job is knowing that the projects we do at Pickard Chilton aren't just buildings — they're future landmarks that help shape the skyline," Zavala said. "That's the really exciting part of what I do here."

• As General Motors' first chief AI officer, Barak Turovsky hired talent and mapped organizational change.
• The CAIO role is growing in popularity as companies look to effectively implement AI tools.
• Turovsky compared being CAIO to being a master chef, who needs to make sure all parts of a restaurant run smoothly.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Barak Turovsky, the former Chief AI Officer at General Motors, based in Silicon Valley. He also held executive roles at Google and Cisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I have worked on AI and LLMs since 2014 — way before they became the hottest thing on Earth.

I'm an ex-Google AI exec who led the first scaled deployment of LLMs and Deep Neural Networks with Google Translate. I also worked as the Chief Product and Technology Officer at a computer vision AI startup, and as the VP of AI at Cisco.

General Motors approached me for the Chief AI Officer role while I was at Cisco, and it felt like a great crash course on using AI to develop physical products. The role no longer exists because I left after GM restructured its software and AI organization; however, until November, I reported to the head of software engineering, who reported to the CEO.

Some people ask, "Do you really need a dedicated AI officer?"

Let's ignore the title because you can call it different names, but I do believe successful AI implementation requires someone in leadership to drive that change, as well as commitment from the top.

Functional business leaders, such as the CTO or CIO, may have little or no understanding of AI. If you want to integrate AI on a software level, you need someone with a different kind of expertise.

Traditional large companies have powerful executives who want to own the benefits of scaling AI, but not necessarily the responsibility. Therefore, someone with deep AI knowledge is needed to direct the traffic.

I like to use a restaurant analogy to break it down.

A CAIO is like a master chef at a restaurant

The analogy is based on three primary resources that create products, or dishes. The first resource includes the kitchen equipment, or the AI infrastructure and models necessary to build AI solutions.

The next can be thought of as the ingredients. It's the data or internal assets used to train and run AI solutions. The last one is talent, or the restaurant staff. You need expertise at different levels — busboys, short-order cooks, sous chefs, and master chefs for the really gourmet restaurants.

The complexity of creating the final product depends on the company's needs, specifically whether the restaurant needs to prepare the food internally. For very advanced, cutting-edge models, which can be thought of as the main course at a gourmet restaurant, companies often need to develop their own AI solutions because standard versions may not perform the required functions.

Think of the CAIO as the master chef. They need to make sure all the different pieces run smoothly. If you are in an industry that requires cutting-edge solutions, you also need to spend a lot of time making sure that the hardest output — a.k.a. the main dish — comes out just right.

The hardest and most important part of the job is securing top talent. Vendors will tell you that their toaster ovens can pop out a French soufflé in 15 minutes. Yet your ingredients will consistently arrive late, of dubious quality, and in incorrect amounts. Your customers will come in, declare they are hungry and want to eat the whole menu, and then leave mid-meal without paying.

What CAIOs should do

The specifics of each role vary. At GM, I worked on a cutting-edge area because AI for physical products, like cars, is largely untouched and getting a lot of traction.

There are three buckets of what a chief AI officer should do. First is AI talent management. I focused a lot on hiring a top-tier team, which is very important because the moment you enter a novel space, you have a small sliver of talent. They need to be motivated and flexible because you're still mapping out those areas.

Then, you need to create a culture of innovation for the company in general. You need to work with internal stakeholders who might be used to doing things in a certain way, but need to change because of AI.

You also need to create organizational change, which starts with mapping the needs and players of your organization. You have people who are AI enthusiasts and skeptics. In a large organization, it's not always easy to identify them. You need to create a top-down and bottom-up framework, which includes clear goals from the top.

In every function, you need to identify champions, and you need to nurture and empower them. The CAIO can't do all the magic while everyone else just sits there.

• McDonald's "Grinch Meal" with pickle salt fries is a big hit. It's selling out across the US.
• The meal hit comes as licensed Grinch merchandise seems more popular than ever. I wondered why.
• I think it all comes down to this: He's a meme-able one, Mr. Grinch.

This week, I had a hankering for a healthful meal, so I headed out to McDonald's for a Big Mac. Not just any Big Mac — I wanted the new "Grinch Meal," which comes in a Happy Meal-style box with a pair of Grinch socks, a drink, your choice of Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets, and fries that come with a packet of dill pickle powder, in this context known as "Grinch Salt."

My dreams were cut short in the drive-thru line when the cashier told me that Grinch Meals were all sold out. It turns out, the meal wasn't just sold out at my location in the suburbs of New York City. The novelty box has been such a hit, it's selling out across the country.

McDonald's marketing director tweeted that it's outsold other big recent promotions, including the Snack Wrap.

(Luckily, or shamefully, my husband had already gotten a Grinch Meal earlier in the week, so I do have the green socks and got to sample the remnants of his pickle fries.)

The runaway success of the Grinch at McDonald's doesn't seem like an anomaly to me.

Look around, and you may notice that it seems like Christmas has gotten a lot more Grinch-y lately. I don't mean that as a metaphor — I literally mean there seems to be more Grinch merchandise, more Grinch content, more Grinch memes than ever before. Right?

Defeated at McDonald's, I sought some retail therapy at some nearby stores and found the aisles flooded with Grinch merchandise.

Walmart had half an aisle in its seasonal section dedicated to Grinch stuff — plush toys, decorations, even neon light-up signs.

There was a ton of Grinch clothing — sweatshirts, pajamas, for both kids and adults. At Marshall's, Grinch throw blankets, socks, toys, and even eyeshadow palettes were all over the store. It seems to me that we are reaching a point of peak Grinch saturation. What gives?

How did the Grinch take over Christmas — and more?

I have some ideas.

On one hand, of course — it's December, and Dr. Suess's 1957 creation is relevant again. But it feels more than that — more than simply seasonal IP.

The Grinch has multi-generational appeal and has endured for decades across formats. There's, of course, the original book, and then the 1964 animated special that included the "You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch" song.

There's the 2000 live-action movie "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," starring Jim Carey, and the 2018 animated version "Dr. Seuss's The Grinch." Those last two movies seem to always be at the top of streaming services when late fall hits. (My own kids have rewatched both an untold number of times.)

The Grinch is also everywhere online

The Grinch has a strange online presence, where he has become highly meme-able in a way that his seasonal IP peers, such as Buddy the Elf or Freddy Krueger, simply haven't.

At the release of the 2018 animated movie, there was some strange Tumblr memeing of the character, partially buoyed by the fact that he was voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was at the time a big Tumblr fandom heartthrob.

The memeibility of the Grinch extends to the Jim Carey portrayal, where his grotesque visage and exaggerated movements are perfect for these grotesque and exaggerated times online. But it's also the 1960s cartoon — there's a popular GIF of the Grinch's hair curling as he smiles that works as a perfect reaction GIF.

And then there's the absurdity of Gen Z and Gen Alpha online, where memes are increasingly meaningless (but that's the point), like "6-7."

For a while last year, a meme with an image of the Grinch, with his color tinted to blue, and the phrase "knee surgery tomorrow" was a huge thing for middle schoolers.

And as memecoins were growing in popularity, I lurked in a Discord channel full of people who were trying to pump a $KNEE cryptocurrency by flooding social media with images of the Grinch.

The Grinch's multi-generational appeal

There's something about the Grinch that appeals not just to little kids, but to teenagers and younger adults.

You can see some of that reflected in the merch collaborations. In 2023, Adidas released a Grinch-inspired sneaker for adult men, and in 2020, Kylie Cosmetics introduced a Grinch-themed holiday makeup line.

This year, Nike has a Grinch shoe, which NBA player Collin Gillespie wore on the court last month.

The Grinch has become one of those characters that is ostensibly for kids but has a teen appeal — a sort of Hot Topic aura, like Hello Hitty, Jack Skellington, or Taz in the 1990s.

This makes sense — he's naughty, after all. While children might see the Grinch as a villain, adults can see his lack of holiday enthusiasm as, frankly, relatable.

And look at all the Grinch merch

But back to all the Grinch merchandise and the meal boxes — does it really seem like there's more than ever? Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which manages merchandise licensing for the Grinch and other Seussian properties, did not respond when I asked for a comment.

I do have a small clue that my theory of Peak Grinch is true.

In a 2024 story on License Global, a website about merchandise licensing news, executives talk about how the Grinch is more popular than ever. (This is a press release, so take that as you will.) Other press releases boast about adding more and more licensees, including big chains like Primark.

What does it say about us that the increasingly most monetized character of the holiday season is the one known for hating Christmas? I couldn't say. But as far as inescapable intellectual property, I think I don't mind the Grinch too much.

In fact, my heart has grown a few sizes.

• An Nvidia staffer said Microsoft's cooling approach for a Blackwell deployment seemed "wasteful."
• The setup also offered "a lot of flexibility and fault tolerance," per an internal email.
• Microsoft said its system promotes efficient heat dissipation and optimizes power delivery.

As Nvidia works to install some of its newest chips in Microsoft data centers, an employee at the GPU giant observed in early fall that Microsoft's cooling approach at one facility seemed "wasteful."

Nvidia has been deploying its GB200 Blackwell architecture at Microsoft and other tech giants as demand for compute to train and run AI models surges.

Blackwell, announced in March 2024, is roughly twice as powerful as its predecessor, Hopper, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at launch. GB200 is part of an earlier wave of Blackwell deployments, with the GB300 generation now available.

In early fall, an internal email sent by a staffer on the Nvidia Infrastructure Specialists (NVIS) team described one Blackwell installation of server racks for OpenAI, which Microsoft supports as its cloud partner and largest investor.

The email described the setup of two GB200 NVL72 racks, each of which houses 72 Nvidia GPUs. The setup uses liquid cooling technology, given the heat generated by multiple GPUs operating closely in tandem.

The staffer wrote that Microsoft's "cooling system and data center cooling approach for their GB200 deployment seems wasteful due to the size and lack of facility water use, but does provide a lot of flexibility and fault tolerance," according to the memo.

While liquid cooling is used for the servers, data centers also use a second, building-level system to expel heat from the facility, according to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California.

The Nvidia employee may have been referring to a building-level system that uses air-cooling instead of water, explained Ren, who studies how data centers use water and other resources.

"This type of cooling system tends to be using more energy," he said, "but it doesn't use water."

A Microsoft spokesperson described a cooling setup consistent with Ren's two-phase explanation.

"Microsoft's liquid cooling heat exchanger unit is a closed-loop system that we deploy in existing air-cooled data centers to enhance cooling capacity on first and third-party platforms," the Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement.

"These systems ensure we maximize our existing global data center footprint for scale while promoting efficient heat dissipation and optimizing power delivery to meet the demands of AI and hyperscale systems," the spokesperson added.

"A trade-off" between resources

As AI infrastructure expands, energy and water use in data-center cooling have become flashpoints globally, prompting pushback in some regions where new facilities are being built.

Ren noted that because data centers can use air cooling, water cooling, or a hybrid system at the building level, "there's a trade-off" between resources.

Air cooling requires more energy, but can "address some of the public concerns with water consumption — because water is something people can really see," he said.

"These companies are profit-driven," he added, "they weigh in the water cost, the energy cost, and also the publicity cost."

Microsoft, for its part, said it intends to be "carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste" by 2030.

"We've also announced a zero water cooling design for our next-generation data centers and breakthroughs in on-chip cooling," the spokesperson said.

Inside the Blackwell installation

The internal email from the Nvidia staffer described some logistical hiccups that occurred during the Blackwell installation in early fall, which can be typical in the early deployment of new data center hardware.

"Onsite support for this activity was a necessity," the staffer wrote. "Many hours were spent creating the validation process documentation as well as vetting the steps worked and made sense to those less familiar with how cluster and system validation is usually performed."

Additionally, the handover processes between Nvidia and Microsoft "required a lot more solidification than what was performed before arrival."

Still, the memo suggested Blackwell's production hardware quality had improved compared to early samples.

The email said GB200 NVL72 production hardware "has good quality" compared to the qualified samples sent to customers for early testing. Both racks had a 100% pass rate on certain compute performance tests.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Business Insider that its Blackwell systems "deliver exceptional performance, reliability, and energy efficiency for a wide variety of computing applications."

"Our customers, including Microsoft, have successfully deployed hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GB200 and GB300 NVL72 systems to meet the world's growing need for artificial intelligence," the spokesperson said.

• Michael Novati, a former Meta principal software engineer, said that the best engineers' names are "nowhere" online.
• "The $100 million engineer is not on LinkedIn with a tagline that's like, #100millionengineer," Novati said on "A Life Engineered."
• The strategy is intended for top-tier Big Tech engineers, Novati said, and not for everyday coders.

LinkedIn is full of corporate braggarts. But don't expect the best engineers to flaunt their success on the platform — or even have an account, according one former Meta employee.

Michael Novati spent almost eight years at Meta, back when it was still called Facebook and hadn't yet doubled down on AI. He reached the rank of principal software engineer and earned the nickname "coding machine."

On the "A Life Engineered" podcast, host Steve Huynh asked Novati about his claim that the top five engineers aren't on LinkedIn. Novati stood by it.

"When I was at Facebook, the top engineers were like, 'If you had a LinkedIn account, people would be wondering if you're job hunting,'" he said.

Novati said these engineers don't need to publicly job hunt because of tech's extensive recruiting arm, which he called the "secrets of the industry."

"There are very senior, very highly paid recruiters that work at the top companies who have very strong long-term social relationships with a lot of top engineers," he said.

How do these engineers and recruiters meet? Novati gave the example of an engineer who spends a week doing campus recruiting at Stanford, bonding with the company's recruiter in the process.

He referred to these as the "secret backroom dealings of Silicon Valley."

"These engineers' names are nowhere, but they are the ones that are the most desirable by these recruiters," he said. "The $100 million engineer is not on LinkedIn with a tagline that's like, #100millionengineer."

Tech recruiting has long been a large, lucrative industry. Big Tech companies both employ in-house recruiters and outside agencies to stay close to key talent.

Meanwhile, talent is becoming increasingly competitive, particularly in the field of AI. Meta shelled out large contracts for its Superintelligence Labs, poaching engineers from its competitors.

Sometimes CEOs even get involved. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly made a list of the top AI talent to poach. OpenAI's chief research officer said that Zuckerberg hand-delivered soup to an employee he was trying to recruit.

One AI worker told Business Insider they got a personal call from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pitching them to join the company. They accepted.

Being offline may not be the golden key to tech recruiting, though. These top-tier engineers are a "specific case," Novati said on the podcast.

"It doesn't mean that your strategy should be: delete LinkedIn and all the offers will come," he said.

It's a rarified class, Novati said, but one that stays away from all semblances of personal branding.

"I don't know any of those top engineers, who get special equity grants and special dinners with Bezos or whatever stuff like that, who have big personal brands," he said.

• An AI agent hacked Stanford's computer science networks for 16 hours in a new study.
• The AI agent outperformed nine out of 10 human participants, said the study by Stanford researchers.
• It also cost a fraction of the six-figure salary for a "professional penetration tester."

For 16 hours, an AI agent crawled Stanford's public and private computer science networks, digging up security flaws across thousands of devices.

By the end of the test, it had outperformed professional human hackers — and at a fraction of the cost.

A study published Wednesday by Stanford researchers found that their AI agent, ARTERMIS, placed second in an experiment with 10 selected cybersecurity professionals. The researchers said the agent could uncover weaknesses that humans missed and investigate several vulnerabilities at once.

Running ARTEMIS costs about $18 an hour, far below the average salary of about $125,000 a year for a "professional penetration tester," the study said. A more advanced version of the agent costs $59 an hour and still comes in cheaper than hiring a top human expert.

The study was led by three Stanford researchers — Justin Lin, Eliot Jones, and Donovan Jasper — whose work focuses on AI agents, cybersecurity, and machine-learning safety. The team created ARTEMIS after finding that existing AI tools struggled with long, complex security tasks.

The researchers gave ARTEMIS access to the university's network, consisting of about 8,000 devices, including servers, computers, and smart devices. Human testers were asked to put in at least 10 hours of work while ARTEMIS ran 16 hours across two workdays. The comparison with human testers was limited to the AI's first 10 hours.

The study also tested existing agents, which lagged behind most human participants, while ARTEMIS performed "comparable to the strongest participants," the researchers said.

Within the 10-hour window, the agent discovered "nine valid vulnerabilities with an 82% valid submission rate," outperforming nine of 10 human participants, the study said.

Some of the flaws had gone unnoticed by humans, including a weakness on an older server that testers could not access because their browsers refused to load it. ARTEMIS bypassed the issue and broke in using a command-line request.

The AI worked in a way humans could not, the researchers said. Whenever ARTEMIS spotted something "noteworthy" in a scan, it spun up additional "sub-agents" to investigate in the background, allowing it to examine multiple targets simultaneously. Human testers had to do this work one step at a time.

But the AI isn't flawless. ARTEMIS struggled with tasks that required clicking through graphical screens, causing it to overlook a critical vulnerability. It is also more prone to false alarms, mistaking harmless network messages for signs of a successful break-in.

"Because ARTEMIS parses code-like input and output well, it performs better when graphical user interfaces are unavailable," the researchers said.

AI is making hacking easier

Advances in AI have lowered the barrier to hacking and disinformation operations, allowing malicious actors to enhance their attacks.

In September, a North Korean hacking group used ChatGPT to generate fake military IDs for phishing emails. A report from Anthropic in August found that North Korean operatives used its Claude model to obtain fraudulent remote jobs at US Fortune 500 tech companies — a tactic that gave them insider access to corporate systems.

The same report also said a Chinese threat actor used Claude to run cyberattacks on Vietnamese telecom, agricultural, and government systems.

"We are seeing many, many attacks," Yuval Fernbach, the chief technology officer of machine learning operations at software supply chain company JFrog, told Business Insider in a report published in April. He added that hackers have been using AI models to extract data, shut systems down, or manipulate a website or tools.

• Tech job seekers faced a tough market in 2025 amid layoffs and slow hiring.
• Cuts at Big Tech firms like Amazon and Microsoft helped fuel fierce competition.
• Business Insider asked tech job seekers about their challenges — and how some overcame them.

When Mody Khan lost his job at Microsoft last December, he was hopeful he'd bounce back quickly. But the tech job market had other ideas.

Now, a year later, he's still looking. Despite a five-year run at Microsoft as a cloud solution architect, he said, even landing interviews has been a struggle.

"I've been constantly applying, and I've had interviews, but I've been turned down everywhere," said Khan, who is in his 50s and lives in Texas. In the meantime, he's exhausted his rainy day fund and fallen behind on his mortgage payments. He's now worried he could lose his home.

"I had savings, and I've depleted almost all of it," he said. "I'm in a very tight spot."

Over the past year, I've spoken with more than 20 tech professionals for Business Insider stories who, like Khan, were struggling to find work. Many were affected by layoffs intended to right-size overhiring during the pandemic and streamline operations. US tech companies have announced roughly 154,000 layoffs through November, according to Challenger, a 17% increase from the prior year and the most of any sector. Big Tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Tesla each announced plans in recent years to cut at least 10,000 employees.

While much of the broader labor market has been marked by slow hiring, it's been cushioned by low levels of firing — but not in tech. The job market has been particularly challenging for tech professionals, who are competing not only with a growing pool of laid-off workers but also with recent college graduates and employed tech professionals looking to switch roles. At the same time, the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and application bots has made it easier for candidates to submit hundreds of applications, overwhelming some employers and making it harder for top applicants to stand out from the crowd.

This surge in demand for tech roles has coincided with a decline in the supply of available openings. After peaking in 2022 following a pandemic-era hiring spree, tech job postings on Indeed are down 33% from their levels in early 2020. The roles that remain are taking longer for companies to fill, and, amid economic uncertainty and the early effects of AI adoption, US businesses are now hiring at one of the slowest rates since 2013.

To succeed in the 2025 tech job market, some candidates believe they need to be close to the perfect candidate. As Khan put it, "It feels like recruiters are looking for Superman."

Laid-off tech workers fear the job market that awaits them

As the hiring slowdown drags on, some tech professionals are bracing for what might await them in today's job market.

In October, Amazon announced plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs, a move CEO Andy Jassy said was intended to reshape the company's culture. Business Insider spoke with six affected employees about how they were coping with the news.

Most began searching for new roles soon after they learned they'd been laid off, in part because they felt the tech job market could be very challenging.

John Paul Martinez, formerly a technical support engineer at Amazon, said the prospect of competing with thousands of other laid-off tech workers — from Amazon and beyond — has left him anxious about the search ahead.

"I am extremely fearful of the competition," said the 35-year-old, who lives in Orlando.

Since 2022, Big Tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla have collectively announced layoffs of more than 125,000 workers, according to data from the online tracker Layoffs.fyi. The roughly 34,000 layoffs from these companies so far this year — most of them tied to cuts at Amazon and Microsoft — mark a 65% increase over 2024.

This influx of job seekers has helped fuel intense competition for roles across the economy. Last quarter, the average job opening received 242 applications — nearly triple the number in 2017, according to data from Greenhouse, a hiring software provider.

James Hwang, a former Amazon IT support engineer, said the hiring landscape has been just as tough as advertised.

"The current job market has been crazy hard," said the 27-year-old, who lives in Michigan. "I've already applied to 100 jobs and haven't gotten any interviews yet."

How some workers are competing — or leaving Big Tech behind

For many tech professionals, landing a Big Tech job is the ultimate goal. But in today's market, some have decided to broaden their horizons.

After losing his contract role as an engineering program manager at Apple in September 2024, Lee Givens Jr. struggled to find work. Given his prior experience in Big Tech at Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, he initially focused his search on similar companies — but was unable to gain traction.

That changed when he stopped limiting his search to Big Tech. In April, he landed a product manager role at a Toyota subsidiary. Givens said his total compensation is significantly higher than it was at Apple — and that he feels he's making more of an impact than he could at a larger tech corporation.

After 17 years at Microsoft, Eduardo Noriega was laid off from his senior software engineering role in May. Instead of looking for another Big Tech job, he pivoted full-time to the staffing firm he'd spent nearly a decade building — a business he'd started partly as a cushion in case a layoff ever came.

"I never dared to quit," he said. "And then Microsoft presented the layoff, and for me, that was like an exit."

However, some workers are still finding ways to land roles at Big Tech companies. After 14 years at Microsoft, Deborah Hendersen was laid off in May from her user researcher role. By October, she was working at Meta as a user experience researcher — a position she landed after receiving a referral from a connection.

In June, shortly before graduation, Andrew Chen landed a software engineering role at Amazon. He said posting about his interview prep journey on TikTok helped keep him accountable — and opened the door to advice from others who'd been through the process.

While some tech job seekers have managed to break through, many told Business Insider they're still searching for work — both in and outside Big Tech. For those still struggling, the challenge isn't just refining their job search strategy — it's also figuring out how to soften the financial blow of losing a paycheck.

After being laid off from his technical program manager position at Microsoft, Ian Carter struggled to find a new job. He drew on savings for several months to cover expenses — crossing his fingers that he'd land something soon. But he never did. In late October, he put his belongings in storage and moved to Florida to live with family, hoping to save money while continuing his search.

"Rent is expensive," he said, "but rent without income coming in is doubly expensive."

• A British Airways flight to Mexico returned to London on Wednesday.
• It turned around over the Atlantic Ocean, five hours into the journey.
• Passengers were on the plane for nine hours before landing back at Heathrow Airport.

British Airways passengers spent more than nine hours on a transatlantic flight that ended up back where it started.

Wednesday's Flight 243 took off from London Heathrow Airport at 1:22 p.m. and was supposed to land in Mexico City around 11 hours later.

However, five hours into the journey, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner turned around over the Atlantic Ocean.

It had already passed Greenland and was only about 150 miles off the coast of Canada's Nunavut territory, according to data from Flightradar24.

The plane then headed back across the ocean, arriving in London just after 10 p.m.

The airline said in a statement that the diversion was due to an unspecified technical issue.

"The flight landed safely and customers disembarked normally following reports of a technical issue with the aircraft. We've apologised to our customers for the delay, and our teams are working to get their journeys back on track," the statement said.

It can be frustrating for passengers when they're diverted to their origin — a so-called flight to nowhere — but often it's the best course of action.

Returning to Heathrow, BA's main hub, makes it easier for the airline to rebook passengers on alternative flights and fix any problems with the aircraft.

Diverting elsewhere might have also left the plane and crew out of place, disrupting the airline's schedule. Plus, a stopover in Canada or the US may have caused the crew to reach their maximum working hours.

When BA Flight 243 turned around, its closest airport was Iqaluit in northern Canada, less than 300 miles away.

Some flights have diverted to this remote town in the past, but it can ultimately be more disruptive.

Last year, an Air France flight diverted to Iqaluit after a burning smell was detected in the cabin.

The pilots declared an emergency, and a different plane was rerouted to rescue the passengers. It was originally scheduled for another flight, so that had to be canceled. Passengers were then taken to New York, where they were rebooked onto other flights to reach their intended destination of Seattle.

Ultimately, it depends on how urgent the diversion is, since safety is the top concern.

However, if possible, returning to the flight's origin can be the simplest option for both passengers and the airline.