• An analysis of large US metros showed two Florida locations had the fastest growth in independent workers.
• Other data showed Florida has been a popular destination to move to.
• Americans could be attracted to freelance or independent work in the stagnant labor market.

Florida has long been a hub for those settling into retirement, and it's also becoming a destination for freelancers and other independent workers.

A recent report from freelance platform Fiverr and market research firm Illuminas showed which big US cities have seen the biggest estimated changes in independent professionals from 2019 to 2024 using government data. The report said since the most recent available data was for 2023, Illuminas estimated the 2024 figures "based on more recent macroeconomic data."

Michelle Baltrusitis, head of community at Fiverr, said there's been a "freelancing boom" in major Sun Belt cities. Orlando and Miami had the highest growth in independent professionals among 30 large US metro areas, at 32% each. Nashville followed, with a growth of 24%. The rest of the top-ten cities were all in the South or Southwest:

"The Sun Belt really represents the sweet spot between lifestyle and opportunity," Baltrusitis, head of community at Fiverr, told Business Insider, adding it tends to offer a lower cost of living, nice weather, and booming economies.

Census Bureau data showed more people have moved into than out of Florida over the past few years, as has the South as a whole.

In the stagnant job market, where hiring opportunities are often harder to come by, building a business, freelancing, or independent contract work could be an attractive option.

Baltrusitis thinks the rise of independent professionals will continue in the Sun Belt and nationwide because people want more work flexibility, multiple income streams, and control over their careers.

Other data suggested a rise in working for yourself. ADP Research found the number of independent contractors rose by 50% between 2019 and 2024, adding growth has been steady since 2021, when the labor force was recovering from pandemic-induced job losses. Ege Aksu, an economist at Revelio Labs, found that the share of job switchers transitioning into entrepreneurship has surged over the past few years while hiring has slowed.

"It's maybe speaking to work culture and autonomy, flexibility that are more talked about in today's job market," Aksu said, who also thinks it could be due to necessity due to the fewer job prospects.

Baltrusitis said people looking to freelance should consider what skills they could monetize and be willing to go through trials and errors. She also suggested that people research how others advertise their skills on freelance platforms.

• Geoffrey Hinton said he was surprised it took Google this long to catch up in the AI race.
• Google received significant praise for its release of Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro models.
• Hinton, an AI pioneer who previously worked at Google Brain, said the tech giant is now likely to surpass OpenAI.

The "Godfather of AI" thinks it's about time that Google caught up in the AI race.

"I think it's actually more surprising than it's taken this long for Google to overtake OpenAI," Geoffrey Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who previously worked at Google Brain, told Business Insider in a Tuesday interview.

Google is coming off the heels of its widely praised launch of Gemini 3, an update that some in tech said elevated the giant beyond OpenAI's GPT-5. Google's Nano Banana Pro AI image model has also proven to be a hit.

Three years after Google reportedly declared a "code red" after the release of ChatGPT, recent reports indicate it's now OpenAI that is sounding the alarm.

"I think that right now they're beginning to overtake it," Hinton said of Google's position relative to OpenAI.

On top of the successful launch of its latest AI model, shares of Google rose on reports that it might broker a billion-dollar deal to supply Meta with its own AI chips.

Making its own chips is a "big advantage" to Google, Hinton said.

"Google has a lot of very good researchers and obviously a lot of data and a lot of data centers," he said. "My guess is Google will win."

Hinton, who helped pioneer AI research during his time at Google Brain, said that the search giant was once at the forefront of AI but held back.

"Google was in the lead for a long time, right?" he said. "Google invented transformers. Google had big chatbots before other people."

Google was cautious, Hinton said, in the wake of Microsoft's disastrous 2016 launch of its short-lived "Tay" AI chatbot, which it took offline after it posted incredibly racist tweets.

"Google, obviously, had a very good reputation and was worried about damaging it like that," he said.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has previously said that the company held back on releasing its chatbot.

"We hadn't quite gotten it to a level where you could put it out and people would've been okay with Google putting out that product," Pichai said earlier this year. "It still had a lot of issues at that time."

In the past, the company has had some shaky rollouts. Just last year, Google had to pause its AI image generator after some users complained that results showing historically inaccurate images of people of color were too "woke." Its initial AI search overviews generated nonsensical advice, such as putting glue on pizza to prevent cheese from falling off.

Google just made a big university donation in Hinton's honor

Hinton spoke to Business Insider ahead of the announcement that Google was donating $10 million CAD to help establish the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto. The university, where Hinton split his time while at Google, said it would match Google's gift.

Hinton left Google in 2023, citing concerns about AI's development. Since then, he has repeatedly spoken out about the risks that AI poses to society, ranging from the potential to outsmart humans to displacing jobs. In 2024, Hinton was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.

"Geoff's work on neural networks — spanning his time in academia and his decade here at Google — laid the foundation for modern AI," Google said in a statement. "This chair honors his legacy and will help the university recruit visionary scholars dedicated to the same kind of curiosity-driven, fundamental research that Geoff championed."

• Social Security benefits will increase by about $60 in 2026 due to a 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment.
• Eligibility rules and benefit amounts depend on Americans' age, income, and work history.
• Seniors can expect more tax relief and higher Medicare premiums in 2026.

For millions of older Americans, Social Security is a financial lifeline.

The program is the country's largest social safety net program, providing monthly payments to nearly 74 million people. Business Insider has heard from hundreds of seniors living check to check without retirement savings and 80-somethings working to supplement their Social Security income.

Here's what you need to know about benefits heading into the new year.

Who will qualify for Social Security in 2026

Americans pay into Social Security throughout their careers. The program is largely funded by payroll taxes, and each individual's monthly checks are based on the income they made during their working years. Qualification rules will remain unchanged in January.

Older adults must be at least 62 years old to enroll in the program — but those who enroll before full retirement age typically receive smaller checks and may experience benefit deductions if they're still employed.

The national retirement age is 66 or 67 for most baby boomers, which is the age that beneficiaries can collect their full Social Security amount. And those who delay filing for benefits until age 70 will receive the highest monthly allotment.

Depending on income and filing age, Social Security beneficiaries typically take home between $800 and $3,000 a month. Widows and widowers can claim benefits based on their spouses' income.

The Social Security Administration also offers benefits for low-income Americans and those with disabilities at any age. Supplemental Social Security is generally available for individuals earning less than $2,000 a month, roughly 130% of the federal poverty line. Social Security Disability provides monthly payments to people experiencing at least one year of disability that affects their ability to work.

Beneficiaries will see higher checks to keep up with inflation

Social Security beneficiaries will receive about $60 more monthly in 2026, thanks to the program's annual cost-of-living adjustment. That 2.8% increase is based on third-quarter inflation data.

The latest COLA announcement, tied to year-over-year increases in the consumer price index, mirrors the past several years. Raise percentages skyrocketed during high pandemic-era inflation, but have hovered around 2% and 3% since 2023.

Older Americans have told Business Insider that, while this COLA raise helps cover the rising cost of groceries, rent, and healthcare, it can present another problem. Low-income retirees often rely on other aid programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and Medicaid. This slight cost-of-living raise can push some older adults over the qualifying threshold for those other aid programs, so lower-income retirees should carefully check those criteria.

Social Security income will still be taxed

Social Security income is typically taxed. Depending on household income, Americans may pay taxes on up to 85% of their Social Security payments.

Those who take home less than $25,000 as an individual and $32,000 as a couple, however, will not have their benefits taxed. Need-based Supplemental Social Security also isn't subject to tax.

Under President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act — signed in July — taxpayers 65 and older can claim up to $6,000 in addition to their normal standard deduction. This new rule is set to last through 2028 and builds off of an existing tax exemption for seniors.

In practice, this means that older Americans filing their 2025 tax returns can write off as much as $23,750. Joint filers over 65 will be able to claim as much as $46,700.

Out-of-pocket Medicare costs will rise

Most Social Security beneficiaries are also enrolled in Medicare, a federal health insurance program available to Americans over 62 and some people with disabilities. Open enrollment began in November and ends December 7.

The program's structure will not change in the new year, but beneficiaries can expect higher out-of-pocket costs because the price of US healthcare is climbing and more baby boomers are needing care as they age. Premiums for Medicare Part B plans will jump by about 10%.

Medicare has four main plan types. Parts A and Part B are standalone insurance plans that cover inpatient and outpatient care; Medicare Advantage allows older Americans to join private plans governed by Medicare rules and out-of-pocket caps; and Part D is typically supplemental insurance that covers prescription drugs and basic provider visits.

Medicare is based on age and Medicaid is based on income, so some Americans qualify for both insurance programs.

The Social Security fund is in jeopardy

America's Social Security fund is expected to become insolvent in the mid-2030s. This doesn't mean checks will stop entirely, but retirees could see smaller benefit amounts unless Congress secures more money. Social Security is supplemented by the federal government, even though individuals pay into the program throughout their careers.

Programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP that some older Americans rely on are funded separately from Social Security and will not be impacted.

• Reddit is retiring r/popular as its default feed.
• CEO Steve Huffman said the feed "gives the false impression of a singular Reddit culture."
• He said removing the feature would promote a more personalized and relevant user experience.

Reddit is getting rid of one of its oldest fixtures.

The platform's CEO, Steve Huffman, said in a post that Reddit would be removing its r/popular feed from the homepage for new users to promote a more personalized and relevant user experience.

The popular feed, located on the left sidebar of the website, displays the most liked recent posts across the platform.

"In theory, it's what's most popular on Reddit, but it's actually what is liked by the most active users on Reddit—which is not the same thing," he said. "Having it as a default feed gives the false impression of a singular Reddit culture, one that is neither representative of Reddit nor appealing to new users (or anyone at all, IMO)."

He summed up his disdain for the feature by saying, "r/popular sucks, and we're moving away from it, and towards better, more relevant and personalized feeds."

Huffman, who has been the platform's CEO since 2015, said Reddit would stop showing the popular feed in the sidebar unless users read it regularly.

He said his favorite part of Reddit was that every community on the platform had its own unique culture, rules, and sense of humor.

"And if your perspective isn't represented, you can create the community you want to see," he said. "The freedom to build your own corner of the internet is what makes Reddit, Reddit."

The platform gets 116 million visitors daily, he said. Reddit's stock price has risen about 44% in the past year.

In the post, he announced a few other changes, like limiting the number of high-traffic communities a single person can moderate, and changing the way it shows community sizes.

"These changes are all part of the same goal: making Reddit more conducive to how people actually use it today," he said.

This is not Reddit's first effort to nudge its users into smaller community groups, as it recalibrates its platform alongside competitors like Quora, and beyond that, the likes of Meta.

In October, Reddit removed its public chat feature and urged users to chat on private group chats as a way to "connect with communities in smaller, focused spaces."

• LinkedIn is dismantling its associate product manager program.
• It's replacing it with an associate builder track that trains hires to code, design, and product manage.
• LinkedIn's chief product officer said the company has adopted small "pods" of full-stack builders.

LinkedIn is dismantling one of Silicon Valley's most familiar early-career tracks: the associate product manager program.

It will be replaced with a new program that trains people to code, design, and build products end-to-end.

LinkedIn's chief product officer, Tomer Cohen, said on an episode of "Lenny's Podcast" published Thursday that the company's long-running associate product manager program will end this year.

Starting in January, new hires will enter the associate product builder program, he said.

"We're going to teach them how to code, design, and PM at LinkedIn," he added, referring to product management.

The shift is part of a broader internal transformation built around what LinkedIn calls the full-stack builder model. Instead of splitting responsibilities among product managers, designers, and engineers, the company wants employees who can bring a product from idea to launch themselves, "regardless of their role in the stack," Cohen said. These builders can combine skills that were once separated across different job functions.

Cohen said he wants these builders to develop vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and judgment — especially the ability to make "high-quality decisions in what is complex, ambiguous situations."

"Everything else, I'm working really hard to automate," he added.

The model is also reshaping how teams are structured. Instead of large groups split by function, LinkedIn has adopted small "pods" of cross-trained builders, allowing it to be more nimble, adaptive, and resilient.

"They can actually match the pace of change to the pace of response," Cohen said.

It's "less about an engineer, designer, PM working together" and more about people "who can flex across," he added.

Cohen, who has worked at LinkedIn for nearly 14 years, said in a post on the platform last month that he is leaving the company in January.

The end of product managers?

Business Insider's Amanda Hoover reported last year that product managers are increasingly seen as critical in the tech world, but some remain skeptical about the role's value.

Some companies have reevaluated their need for product managers. Business Insider's Ashley Stewart reported in March that Microsoft wants to shift its workforce composition by increasing the number of engineers relative to product or program managers to run leaner. Other companies, like Airbnb and Snap, have been rethinking the need for product managers.

Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said on an episode of the "No Priors" podcast published in July that early-stage teams don't need product managers at all.

Engineering leaders should drive product direction until they no longer have the bandwidth. "Your engineer should be hands-on. They should be having great ideas as well," he said.

Others take the opposite view. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng said in an episode of the "No Priors" podcast published in August that product management, not engineering speed, has become the bottleneck in AI startups.

In the past, building a prototype might have taken three weeks, so waiting another week for user feedback was acceptable. But when AI tools let teams build a prototype in a day, having to "wait a week for user feedback" is "really painful," Ng said.

That pressure forces startups to make faster product decisions, the kind of calls product managers are trained to make, he added.

• Fei-Fei Li criticized extreme AI rhetoric as misleading and unhelpful for public discourse.
• She urged balanced, factual communication about artificial intelligence and its impact.
• Other AI leaders, including Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun, have also called for balanced AI messaging.

The current rhetoric around AI is far too dramatic, says the Godmother of AI.

"I like to say I'm the most boring speaker in AI these days because precisely my disappointment is the hyperbole on both sides," Fei-Fei Li said in a talk at Stanford University published on Thursday.

"We've got the total extinction, doomsday, and all that talk about AI will ruin humanity, machine overlord," she said. On the other hand, she said, there is the "total utopian" scenario where people use words like "post-scarcity" and "infinite productivity."

Li is a longtime Stanford computer science professor famous for inventing ImageNet. Last year, she cofounded World Labs, a company building AI models to perceive, generate, and interact with 3D environments.

At the Stanford talk, she added that this "extreme rhetoric" is filling tech discourse and misinforming vulnerable people.

"The world's population, especially those who are not in Silicon Valley, need to hear the facts, need to hear what this truly is," she said. "Yet that kind of discourse, that kind of communication, that kind of public education is not as good as I hope it is."

Li is among the top computer scientists who are advocating for more balanced messaging around AI and its impact on society.

In July, Google Brain founder Andrew Ng said that he thinks artificial general intelligence is overrated.

AGI refers to a stage when AI systems possess human-level cognitive abilities and can learn and apply knowledge just like people. The execs of leading AI labs are often asked when they think AGI is coming and what it will mean for human workers.

"AGI has been overhyped," Ng said in a talk at Y Combinator. "For a long time, there'll be a lot of things that humans can do that AI cannot."

Meta's former chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has said that large language models are "astonishing" but limited.

"They're not a road towards what people call AGI," he said in an interview last year. "I hate the term. They're useful, there's no question. But they are not a path towards human-level intelligence."

Last Month, LeCun announced on LinkedIn that he was leaving Meta after 12 years to launch an AI startup.

• Roblox and Snapchat are now blocked in Russia over what it said were concerns about extremism.
• They're now added to an extensive list of blocked or restricted platforms in Russia for such reasons.
• Apple's FaceTime also faces restrictions for what Russia said was "terrorist" activity.

Russia's internet and media regulator said this week that it has blocked Snapchat and Roblox, saying both platforms were used for "extremist and terrorist" activity.

Roskomnadzor announced its decision to block Snapchat on Thursday, but said it had already made the social media app unavailable in Russia since October 10.

"According to law enforcement agencies, Snapchat is being used to organize and conduct terrorist activities in the country, recruit perpetrators, and commit fraud and other crimes against our citizens," it said in a statement, per state media.

The federal agency made a similar announcement on Wednesday regarding Roblox, accusing the gaming platform of enabling the distribution of propaganda advocating for extremist or terrorist activities.

It also said that users were using Roblox to spread "LGBT information," which Russia legally considers extremist.

Meanwhile, Roskomnadzor said on Thursday that it is also imposing "restrictive measures" on Apple's FaceTime video calling service.

State media outlet TASS wrote that the agency said that "FaceTime is being used to coordinate terrorist activities in the country, recruit terrorists, and commit fraud and other crimes against citizens."

A Roblox spokesperson told Business Insider that the company has a "deep commitment to safety" and enacts proactive measures to catch and prevent harmful content on the platform.

"We respect the local regulations in the countries where we operate and believe Roblox provides a positive space for learning, creation, and meaningful connection for everyone," they said.

The gaming firm's CEO, Dave Baszucki, said in September 2022 that Russia contributed roughly 2 million active daily Roblox users at the time, compared to 11 million in the US.

Apple and Snap Inc. did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Since it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has stepped up internet regulation by placing varying degrees of restrictive measures on international social media and messaging platforms, including bans on Signal and Meta's WhatsApp and Instagram.

Telegram, a messaging app founded by Russian-born Pavel Durov, has been partially restricted in Russia, with voice and video calls limited in the country. The Kremlin is also suspected of throttling YouTube traffic in the country.

The Kremlin has cited extremism and terrorism concerns for internet restrictions since before 2022, but now also uses these terms to describe Ukrainian or anti-Kremlin partisan attacks on its territory.

It's unclear, however, whether the latest restrictions are related to such attacks at all. Ukraine's defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Additionally, Russia has been dealing with domestic attacks and threats that don't have strong links to Ukraine.

In March 2024, at least 149 people were killed, and another 609 were injured during a coordinated attack at a concert venue in Moscow. An Afghanistan-based branch of ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.