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• Peter Thiel faced backlash from pro-Palestine protesters during an event in Cambridge, UK. 
• Thiel is the cofounder of Palantir, a data-mining firm that works with the Israel Defense Forces.
• Protesters interrupted his speech at the Cambridge Union and accused him of genocide. 

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was trapped inside a student debating hall on Wednesday by pro-Palestine protesters who accused him of genocide.

Thiel, 56, is a cofounder of data-mining company Palantir, which supplies the Israel Defense Forces with technology for "war-related missions."

Thiel was giving a speech at the Cambridge Union Society in the UK (which is independent of the University of Cambridge) when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted his monologue. They were later photographed being escorted out of the event.

Videos circulating on X show protesters gathered outside the building. One video, posted by Mail on Sunday journalist Sabrina Miller, shows a large group of protesters waving Palestinian flags and chanting.

"Peter Thiel trapped inside Cambridge Union. Protesters not letting him leave," Miller wrote.

Thiel's vehicles were also blocked from leaving the Cambridge Union for more than an hour by hundreds of protesters, according to Varsity, Cambridge University's independent student newspaper.

The Times reported that Thiel taunted the group of activists by smiling and waving at them while taking pictures. The report said he had to arrive several hours early to avoid confrontations.

"Since October 7th, 14,000 children in Palestine have been murdered, and Palantir is complicit in that. Your actions are complicit in the genocide of thousands of people," one protester from the Youth Demand campaign group could be heard saying in a video posted to X.

"Your technology is ensuring that hospitals are being bombed," they added.

"It's embarrassing and appalling that anyone could even want to attend a talk by a man profiting millions off the backs of dead people," one protester said in a press release issued by Youth Demand.

"Palestinian lives are not disposable and I cannot stand for profit over human lives," they added.

"Since our founding in 1815, the Cambridge Union Society's foremost principle is that of freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas," Paul Seagrove, Communications Manager at the Cambridge Union Society, told Business Insider.

"In this spirit, we both support the right to peaceful protest alongside the right for our speakers and members to voice their opinion. Last night's event demonstrated this long-standing tradition of the society."

Representatives for Youth Demand campaign group and Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The exact details of Palantir's partnership with Israel aren't clear. In 2023, the company introduced its AI platform for militaries to analyze targets and create battle plans, Bloomberg said.

"Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir's advanced technology in support of war-related missions," the company's executive vice president, Josh Harris, told Bloomberg.

"This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation in Israel."

Earlier this week, Palantir posted revenue of $634 million in the quarter ending March 31, a 21% increase from the same time last year.

Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO, previously lashed out at the wave of pro-Palestine student protests occurring at universities. He doubled down on his comment in theon the earnings call.

"The greatest institutions of our time disappear and turn into discriminatory dysfunction," he said.

• American Airlines announced a charter flight to France for 70 World War II veterans.
• It will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
• The trip will start with a send-off parade at Dallas-Forth Worth Airport.

Dozens of World War II veterans will enjoy a free flight to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

American Airlines announced Wednesday that it will fly 70 veterans aboard a chartered Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. It will start with a dinner at the carrier's headquarters and a send-off parade at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, before the chartered flight to Paris on May 31.

The veterans will spend two days in the French capital before a series of events in Normandy, finishing with a ceremony at the American Cemetery.

Back in February, Delta Air Lines also announced similar plans. It will fly 60 World War II veterans directly to Normandy for the third year in a row.

One of the veterans being flown by AA is Frank Perry — a former pilot with Piedmont Airlines, which later became part of American. He served in the Army Air Corps as a turret gunner.

Felix Maurizio, a US Navy veteran, will also be on the flight. He was on one of the landing craft that transported soldiers, including his brother, to Omaha Beach on D-Day.

"We're honored to play a part in helping this group of heroic veterans return to Normandy," said David Seymour, American's chief operating officer and an army veteran himself.

"This special journey is not only an expression of our gratitude for these heroes and the sacrifices they made for our freedom, but we hope to help shine a light on their extraordinary stories and preserve their legacies for generations to come."

• Cohere unveils fine-tuned AI model it says outperforms GPT-4 on some tasks. 
• The model is also cheaper to run, costing up to 15 times less than larger AI systems. 
• Cohere is betting on cheaper, business-focused AI as it tries to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI rival Cohere has unveiled an updated AI model it says is more useful and cheaper to run than GPT-4.

The AI startup says it is rolling out the ability to fine-tune its Command R AI model, allowing it to outperform larger models like GPT-4 in some use cases while costing up to fifteen times less to operate.

It raises hopes that smaller, cheaper models might be able to match the larger, more expensive AI systems built by tech giants as concerns grow over the spiraling costs of the AI boom.

"We have found that fine-tuning on data sets with a small model gets really great results," Cohere cofounder Nick Frosst told Business Insider.

"Fine tuning on Command R, when we benchmarked it against the competition, outperforms some models in completely different weight classes and can then do better than them at a tiny bracket of the price," he added.

Cohere said when tested on tasks such as summarizing meetings and analyzing financial and scientific information, the fine-tuned version of Command R was more accurate than GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and Claude Opus, the most advanced model built by Amazon-backed Anthropic.

Cohere performed these tests itself, and found that its fine-tuned Command R model scored 80.2% on accuracy when summarizing meetings, compared to 78.8% for GPT-4 and 77.9% for Claude Opus. Similarly, when analyzing financial data Command R was 6.2% more accurate than GPT-4 and 5.3% more accurate than Claude.

The running cost of the fine-tuned model, known as the inference cost, is also far below GPT-4 and Claude Opus, costing between $2 to $4 per million tokens compared to $30 to $60 for GPT-4.

Cohere said that as Command R, which initially launched in March, is significantly smaller than the likes of GPT-4, it costs much less to run.

Fine-tuning, which sees users tailor the model with specialist data, also reduces the amount of computation required to run the model by making it better at more relevant tasks.

Fine-tuning on the Command R model is available on Cohere's platform from Thursday, with availability on other platforms coming in the near future.

Cohere bets on enterprise

The massive amount of computer power needed to train large AI models like GPT-4 and Meta's Llama has forced many AI companies into a multi-billion-dollar arms race, even as the path to making AI profitable remains elusive.

Mark Zuckerberg told investors that Meta will continue spending "aggressively" on AI, and OpenAI boss Sam Altman said last month that he "doesn't care" if building Artificial General Intelligence — AI with above human-level intelligence — costs $5 billion, $50 billion or $500 billion.

"As long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills, we're making AGI. It's going to be expensive," Altman said to a group of students at Stanford University.

Cohere, which is based in Toronto, has taken a different approach. The company is targeting businesses and enterprise customers, offering smaller AI models specifically tailored to business uses at a fraction of the cost of larger models.

"I think there's a very interesting scientific debate to be had about whether or not large language models alone will scale to AGI — I don't think they will. So I don't think just throwing more money into compute will result in something like AGI," said Frosst.

"Large language models are an incredible technology. I think they can deliver so much more value than they're delivering currently. But only if they're actually put into real business use cases, if they're made at a reasonable price point," he added.

Cohere was valued at over $2.1 billion last year, but the road hasn't been completely smooth. The Information reported in March that despite its lofty valuation, Cohere was generating only $13 million in annualized revenue by the end of last year.

Business Insider understands that annualized revenue had risen to around $35 million by the end of Q1. Frosst said that Cohere's revenue had increased due to the company releasing a steady stream of new models and updates this year.

"It's been a good start to the year for us. I think that is a direct result of us focusing on actually business-ready and real-world solutions rather than lofty science projects," he said.

However, the company still faces a challenge in competing with Big Tech-backed heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The picture for AI startups looks less sunny than a year ago, with buzzy firms like Stability AI and Inflection encountering problems in recent months.

Stability conducted layoffs last month as part of an effort to "focus" its operations after CEO Emad Mostaque resigned, following reports that the startup was experiencing financial problems.

Meanwhile, Inflection, which was once valued at $4 billion, lost cofounder Mustafa Suleyman and a chunk of its staff to Microsoft in March.

Cohere is counting on its focus on enterprise and low-cost models to help it carve out a niche in an increasingly competitive AI landscape.

"We're interested in making these models as useful as possible," said Frosst.

"We're interested in a world where every day you use a language model to help you in any of the things you're using a computer with. You don't need AGI for that," he added.

• Home prices are falling in parts of Florida and Texas even as they soar nationally.
• Sale prices only dropped in 15 of 221 metro areas last quarter, and five were in those states.
• High prices, steeper mortgage rates, and supply catching up with demand help explain the declines.

Home prices are falling in parts of Florida and Texas as buyers tap out and supply catches up with demand.

The median sale price for existing single-family homes rose in 93% of 221 metro areas in the year through March, the National Association of Realtors reported this week.

There were falls in just 15 markets, and five of those were in Florida and Texas — Cape Coral-Fort Myers (-4.4%), Panama City (-3.8%), and Crestview-Fort Walton Beach-Destin (-0.2%), and San Antonio-New Braunfels (-4.6%) and Austin-Round Rock (-0.3%) respectively.

That's a striking contrast to the national picture. Overall, the median home price rose 5% to north of $389,000, led by metro areas such as Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (23.7%), and the Illinois regions of Kankakee (22%), Rockford (20.1%), and Champaign-Urbana (20%).

Florida and Texas are known for their red-hot real estate markets, so it's surprising to see prices dropping in several parts of those states.

Buyers may be getting priced out. Austin-Round Rock ranked among the 50 most expensive markets analyzed by NAR, with a median sale price of $467,000.

Cape Coral ($415,000) and Panama City ($351,000) were also in the top 100. Homeowners in Florida face the added headache of surging insurance costs due to climate risks.

Not only are homes expensive, but taking out a loan to buy one has become far more costly, creating an affordability crisis.

The monthly mortgage payment on a typical home with 20% down jumped by more than 9% last quarter to north of $2,000, NAR found.

The increase is largely down to the Federal Reserve's campaign to crush inflation by raising interest rates. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate was nearly 7% last quarter — more than double its 3% level at the start of 2022.

Florida and Texas have also scrambled to build more houses in recent years, since the pandemic sparked a surge in people moving to those states.

Redfin identified only 10 metro areas that increased their housing supply in the year to March, and eight were in those two southern states.

'Lock-in effect'

Inventory has now caught up with demand in some areas, leading to homes sitting on the market for longer, sellers cutting prices, and price growth stagnating.

That differs from much of the country, where supply remains heavily constrained duer to the "lock-in effect" — sellers holding off on listing their homes because they don't want to give up their cheap mortgages.

Florida's Cape Coral led the supply boom with a 51% increase in homes for sale last quarter. It also had one of the highest rates of seller price cuts and saw an unrivaled 31-day increase in the time taken to sell a typical home, Redfin found.

In line with NAR, Redfin found that prices fell in San Antonio and were flat in Austin, even as the vast majority of markets recorded price increases.

The takeaway is that a combination of sky-high prices, steeper mortgage rates and other costs like insurance squeezing buyers' budgets, and supply catching up with demand has resulted in prices flatlining or falling in parts of Florida and Texas, bucking the national trend.

That's bad news for sellers and homeowners hoping their properties will appreciate in the near term. But it could give bold buyers an opening to snag their next home.

• As someone who's worked at Costco for 18 years, I know which items are worth grabbing at the store.
• The bakery's lemon-meringue cheesecake is a great springtime dessert.
• You can add the Bloomington Cascading-Cup fountain or the Woozoo five-speed globe fan to your home.

From Costco's rotating inventory to its competitive pricing, there are many reasons shoppers love the warehouse — in fact, the store is a leading retailer in customer satisfaction.

As someone who's worked at Costco for over 18 years, I'm always on the lookout for the best-value items at the wholesale retailer. Here are 10 things I recommend checking out at Costco in May.

Prices may vary by location.

The Kirkland Signature Tuscan chicken wrap makes a quick lunch or dinner.

This month, Costco is carrying a new deli item: the Kirkland Signature Tuscan chicken wrap. The wraps, stuffed with ingredients like rotisserie chicken, spinach, bell peppers, red-pepper pesto, and black olives, make an easy, quick meal.

Each container comes with four precut wraps and costs $7 per pound, which comes out to about $16 to $17 total.

The Happy Hop Crocodile Cave Adventure waterslide is a cool gift idea for kids.

The Happy Hop Crocodile Cave Adventure waterslide is a perfect way to keep kids busy during the summer. The inflatable slide features an electric air blower and is intended for kids ages 3 and up.

I like that it's easy to store and bring outside when the weather's warm. The Happy Hop waterslide is $400 at my location.

The Bloomington Cascading-Cup fountain can add elegance to a front porch or garden.

The Bloomington Cascading-Cup fountain, which is just over 5 feet tall, can effortlessly dress up an outdoor space. It's made of steel and features a basin filled with glass beads.

It also comes with hardware and an Allen wrench for easy assembly. The Bloomington Cascading-Cup fountain is $300 at my Costco.

I had to try the Kirkland Signature dipped-and-chewy granola bars when I saw them at my store.

The Kirkland Signature dipped-and-chewy granola bars just hit shelves at my store, and the chocolate-and-caramel combination immediately hooked me.

Every box contains 48 individually wrapped bars made with caramel, rolled oats, and a milk-chocolate coating. I grabbed an $11 box at my location.

The Blackstone six-piece griddle tool set can come in handy for outdoor cooking.

The Blackstone six-piece griddle tool set has been a hot seller at my location. The kit includes a griddle scraper, spatulas, and two 16-ounce bottles — everything you need for outdoor grilling.

This griddle tool set is $20 at my location.

Keep cool with the Woozoo five-speed globe fan.

The Woozoo globe fan can be a great addition to a home or office as temperatures increase. The compact, remote-controlled fan has five speeds, a timer feature, and an LED turn-off function.

This fan costs $47 at my store.

Two tasty desserts are combined in Costco's lemon-meringue cheesecake.

The Costco bakery is now carrying a lemon-meringue cheesecake, which includes a layer of tangy lemon curd, a toasted-meringue topping, and a sweet graham-cracker crust.

The lemon-meringue cheesecake is $22 at my local Costco.

Prepare for pool-time adventures with the Hurley ladies' swimsuits.

As summer approaches, many Costco warehouses are carrying the Hurley ladies' swimsuits. They come in various patterns and colors, including plain black and orange-and-pink floral designs.

I like that they have stretchy fabric and adjustable shoulder straps. The Hurley swimsuits are $22 at my store.

The Häagen-Dazs vanilla milk-chocolate-almond ice-cream bars are a delicious dessert for warm weather.

The Häagen-Dazs vanilla milk-chocolate-almond bars are a delicious warm-weather dessert. They're made with a vanilla ice cream base and dipped in sweet milk chocolate and crunchy-almond pieces.

Each box containing 15 bars is $13.90 at my store.

The 4505 Chicharrones chile-limón party mix is a great snack for get-togethers.

If you're looking for a crunchy snack, you might want to try the 4505 Chicharrones chile-limón party mix.

This snack features seasoned fried pork rinds and puffed snacks in Tajín, chile, and lemon flavors. My Costco has an 11-ounce tub of the 4505 Chicharrones party mix for $8.

• 4 flight attendants smuggled drug money from New York to the Dominican Republic, prosecutors said.
• The attendants, who held 'Known Crewmember' status, used a special security lane.
• Prosecutors said they transported about $8 million in cash, receiving a fee in return.

Four flight attendants have been charged in connection with a yearslong scheme to smuggle "millions of dollars of drug money" from New York to the Dominican Republic on commercial flights, federal authorities said Wednesday.

The flight attendants — Charlie Hernandez, 42; Sarah Valerio Pujols, 24; Emmanuel Torres, 34; and Jarol Fabio, 35 — were all arrested on Tuesday on various charges, including the operation of an unlicensed money transmission business.

According to a pair of federal indictments unsealed by the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, all of the defendants held "Known Crewmember" status with the Transportation Security Administration.

Using this status, they could access a special security lane at John F. Kennedy International Airport without undergoing typical passenger screening procedures.

"Flight attendants are ideal for smuggling bulk cash" for this reason, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent wrote in the indictments.

By "abusing their privileges as airline employees," the flight attendants managed to transport about $8 million in "bulk cash" from the US to the Dominican Republic over several years, US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

The indictments said the smuggling occurred from at least 2014 until as late as 2023.

Hernandez was accused of smuggling at least $2.5 million in narcotics proceeds from the US to the Dominican Republic, while Pujols, Torres, and Fabio were each accused of having smuggled narcotics proceeds, or cash they understood to be narcotics proceeds, worth at least $1.5 million.

In one of the indictment documents, an HSI special agent outlined sting operations in which a cooperating witness provided $60,000 in government funds to Fabio in 2023 and Torres in 2022.

The pair believed the money was the proceeds of narcotics trafficking and needed to be transported, according to the indictment.

In separate incidents, a year apart, Torres and Fabio met another informant in the Dominican Republic to deliver the cash, which was then returned to law enforcement, prosecutors said.

The interactions were recorded.

In December 2019, an informant gave Hernandez $121,215 in cash, of which $61,215 was handed over to Pujols.

Pujols was stopped by Customs and Border Protection agents at JFK.

The special agent said in the indictment that Pujols claimed to have about $1,000 on her, but agents found about $60,000 in three bundles concealed in her purse. She was fired from her job, according to the indictment.

Delta Airlines confirmed to NBC News that two defendants worked for them.

In a statement provided to Business Insider, a Delta spokesperson said: "Delta has cooperated fully with law enforcement in this investigation and will continue to do so."

It's unclear which airlines the other two defendants worked for.

Legal representatives for Fabio and Torres did not immediately respond to BI's request for comment. The other defendants' attorneys were not listed on court documents.

In the statement announcing the unsealing of the indictments, HSI Special Agent in Charge Ivan J. Arvelo said the defendants "took advantage of airport security checkpoints by using their trusted positions as flight attendants."

He said the investigation "exposed critical vulnerabilities in the airline security industry" and has "illuminated methods that narcotics traffickers are utilizing."

• Uber lost some of its "most frequent customers" thanks to the rise of remote working, its CEO said.
• Dara Khosrowshahi made the observation during the company's Q1 earnings call.
• That trend is reversing somewhat though, and "people are getting back to work," Khosrowshahi said.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wants to see more workers going back to the office, and not just at his own company.

Workers are still not using Uber as a "daily habit" for their commute as many did prior to the pandemic, which is hurting the ride-hailing giant's growth, the CEO said.

"With the pandemic, I think a lot of people who were kind of commuting to work, etc., stopped commuting," Khosrowshahi said on the company's earnings call on Wednesday.

"We have lost some of our most frequent customers," he said, adding that "there is an audience who kind of stopped using us as frequently as they used to."

Khosrowshahi's comments came as Uber reported mixed earnings for the year's first quarter.

Total revenue was roughly in line with Wall Street's expectations, coming in at $10.13 billion.

However, the company reported a surprising net quarterly loss of $654 million.

Shares of Uber dropped sharply on Wednesday following the report, but recovered some losses in pre-market trading Thursday.

The company attributed the loss to legal and regulatory changes and settlements and added that the loss includes "a $721 million net headwind from unrealized losses related to the reevaluation of its equity investments."

Uber is currently facing a multimillion-pound lawsuit from more than 10,000 black cab drivers in London.

Khosrowshahi told CNBC the loss had "nothing to do with the operating business."

His line is supported by Uber's $1.4 billion EBITDA, an 82% year-on-year increase.

Looking ahead, Khosrowshahi said on the earnings call that Uber saw the "weekday commute use case" as a key area for growth as more people return to the office — or are forced back under strict mandates.

"Some folks may not like that, but we love it here at Uber, people getting back to work and getting back to the office," he said,

The CEO said he was hopeful that commuters would continue to return.

"One interesting trend we're seeing is that people are getting back to work," he told CNBC in an interview.

Globally, gross bookings — the value of transactions on its app — were up 21% year on year, and the audience expanded by 15%, Khosrowshahi said.

"Demand for Uber remains strong," he added on the earnings call.

However, despite Khosrowshahi's vision of a return to regular commuting, CEOs are gradually starting to accept that hybrid work is set to stay.

In a KPMG survey released in April, 34% of US CEOs said they expect workers whose roles were once tied to an office to be back in their cubicles five days a week in the next three years, down from 62% who held that view in 2023.

About 98% of Americans want to work remotely at least some of the time, according to Forbes Advisor.

Khosrowshahi told employees that beginning in April 2022, Uber staffers in 35 of the company's locations were required to return to the office at least half the time.

He has allowed some workers to be entirely remote if they receive clearance from managers.

Uber did not immediately reply to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• A Ukrainian platoon has shot down all of the drones it's encountered, its captain told The Guardian.
• Oleksandr Zhygun said his soldiers are using "antiquated" guns to do it, per the outlet.
• Ukraine has turned to Soviet-era weapons and earlier guns to overcome shortages of Western arms.

A Ukrainian captain operating near Kyiv said his platoon has shot down every Russian drone it has encountered, despite having what he describes as "antiquated" guns.

"We are using antiquated guns because we don't have new ones," Oleksandr Zhygun, a platoon captain in Ukraine's 241st Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces, told The Guardian.

Zhygun's Kalashnikov assault rifle was made in 1989, he said, the same year the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Yehven Dolin, a soldier in the brigade, uses a World War I-designed M2 Browning machine gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck, per the outlet.

"It might be old, but it works," Dolin said of his gun, adding that it doesn't make sense to deploy a $4 million US-provided Patriot missile to target a $20,000 drone.

Ukrainian troops have resorted to using old weapons, including World War I-era machine guns, antiaircraft guns from the 1940s, and Cold War-era rocket launchers, to try to stop Russian drones and make up for the lack of Western-provided missiles and ammunition.

But in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian troops are struggling against Russia's night-vision drones, a Ukrainian soldier told the Kyiv Post last month.

The task of protecting Kyiv's skies has also become more difficult with Russia painting its drones black, making them harder to detect, Zhygun told The Guardian.

Ukraine is waiting on significant resources from the US after Republicans in Congress agreed to a $61 billion military aid package.

In the meantime, Russia is exploiting Ukraine's weakened air defense systems before supplies make it to the front lines, according to an assessment from The Institute for the Study of War.

The effect has been felt on the battlefield, with Ukrainian soldiers struggling to hold the line and suffering heavy losses on key battlefronts in Ukraine's east, forcing them to pull out of the strategic city of Avdiivka.

Asked whether Ukraine could still win the war, Zhygun told The Guardian it was a "difficult" question and that they needed more air defense systems.

"For now, we have to ration our bullets. A lot depends on our Western partners," he said.

• An exiled colonel told BBC News that Saudi Arabia authorized lethal force to clear land for Neom.
• The Huwaitat tribe primarily occupied the land. One villager was reportedly killed by authorities.
• Col Rabih Alenezi went into exile in the UK last year. 

An exiled Saudi colonel says Saudi Arabia authorized the use of lethal force to clear the way for its Neom desert megacity.

Col Rabih Alenezi, who went into exile in the UK last year, told BBC News he was ordered to evict people living on the land to make way for a part of the project called The Line.

The area was mostly populated by the Huwaitat tribe, which traditionally lives on lands earmarked for the futuristic megacity.

Alenezi said the April 2020 order claimed the tribe was made up of "many rebels" and "whoever continues to resist should be killed, so it licensed the use of lethal force against whoever stayed in their home." He told BBC News he managed to avoid the mission on fake medical grounds.

One of the villagers, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was later killed by Saudi authorities, according to Saudi activists.

At the time, Saudi state security claimed al-Huwaiti had opened fire on security forces. Human rights organizations have disputed this claim, BBC News reported.

The outlet said it was not able to independently verify Alenezi's comments about lethal force.

Representatives for the Saudi government did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours. A representative for The Line declined to comment.

The Saudi government has said more than 6,000 people have been moved to facilitate its Neom project, but some human rights groups estimate the figure is higher.

Last year, UN human rights experts said three men protesting the Neom project were sentenced to death. UN Special Rapporteurs — experts who advise its human-rights council — claimed the men had been convicted under "overly vague" terror laws for their objections.

Saudi Arabia has been trying to suppress any public criticism about its ambitious Vision 2030 plans.

In July, a Saudi woman was jailed for 30 years for criticizing Neom on X. Fatima al-Shawarbi objected to the villagers' exile from their homes to make way for the project.

• OpenAI researchers Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders recently left the company behind ChatGPT.
• Kokotajlo said on a forum he doesn't think OpenAI will "behave responsibly around the time of AGI."
• Kokotajlo was on the governance team, and Saunders worked on the Superalignment team at OpenAI. 

Two OpenAI employees who worked on safety and governance recently resigned from the company behind ChatGPT.

Daniel Kokotajlo left last month and William Saunders departed OpenAI in February. The timing of their departures was confirmed by two people familiar with the situation. The people asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss the departures, but their identities are known to Business Insider.

Kokotajlo, who worked on the governance team, is listed as an adversarial tester of GPT-4, which was launched in March last year. Saunders had worked on the Alignment team, which became the Superalignment team, since 2021.

Kokotajlo wrote on his profile page on the online forum LessWrong that he quit "due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI."

In a separate post on the platform in April, he partially explained one of the reasons behind his decision to leave. He also weighed in on a discussion about pausing AGI development.

"I think most people pushing for a pause are trying to push against a 'selective pause' and for an actual pause that would apply to the big labs who are at the forefront of progress," Kokotajlo wrote.

He added: "The current overton window seems unfortunately centered around some combination of evals-and-mitigations that is at IMO high risk of regulatory capture (i.e. resulting in a selective pause that doesn't apply to the big corporations that most need to pause!) My disillusionment about this is part of why I left OpenAI."

Saunders said in a comment on his LessWrong profile page that he resigned that month after three years at the ChatGPT maker.

The Superalignment team, which was initially led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, is tasked with building safeguards to prevent artificial general intelligence (AGI) going rogue.

Sutskever and Leike have previously predicted that AGI could arrive within a decade. It's not clear if Sutskever is still at OpenAI following his participation in the brief ousting of Sam Altman as CEO last year.

Saunders was also a manager of the interpretability team, which researches how to make AGI safe and examines how and why models behave the way they do. He has co-authored several papers on AI models.

Kokotajlo and Saunders' resignations come amid other departures at OpenAI. Two executives, Diane Yoon and Chris Clark, quit last week, The Information reported. Yoon was the VP of people, and Clark was head of nonprofit and strategic initiatives.

OpenAI also parted ways with researchers Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov, according to another report by The Information last month.

OpenAI, Kokotajlo, and Saunders did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Do you work for OpenAI? Got a tip? Contact this reporter at jmann@businessinsider.com for a nonwork device.