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This AI pioneer runs his life with a dozen agents — and still doesn’t trust them alone

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On a given day, Illia Polosukhin has a dozen agents completing different “missions” for him.

One such mission could be “I want to become a better CEO,” he said.

“So it effectively summarizes all of the meeting notes, Google Drive docs, Slack messages, and provides me with a coaching and executive summary of what happened, what I’m missing, and where decisions are stuck,” Polosukhin told Business Insider. “So that runs every week.”

Polosukhin calls these agents his “billionaire-chief-of-staff level of support.” The description is “literally” in the prompt, he said: “You’re a billionaire’s chief of staff.”

It’s an early glimpse of the future Polosukhin sees not only for individual workers or CEOs, but for the entire global economy: a world where agents can make trades, coordinate supply chains, and broker transactions on behalf of people and large companies. And in his view, we’re wholly unprepared for it.

“I think the bigger issue is that we have fundamentally not prepared the system for AGI (artificial general intelligence) being available,” he said. The system being “society, the internet, government institutions, etc.”

Polosukhin is one of the key figures behind generative AI. In 2017, he coauthored the seminal research paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture, a novel approach to building AI models. That groundbreaking paper is the reason there’s a “T” at the end of ChatGPT.

Peeling back the black box

Very little about the trajectory of AI surprises the researcher-turned-founder.

The same year the Transformer architecture paper was published, Polosukhin started NEAR AI around the idea that machines could eventually generate software. His thesis was that humans would talk to computers in natural language, like English, and the machines would write the code.

“In 2017, that sounded pretty ridiculous,” he said. Today, it’s called vibe coding.

Polosukhin is also unsurprised by the capabilities some models are now showing. Anthropic on Tuesday said its latest preview model, Mythos, is so capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities that the lab is limiting access.

Polosukhin said he had been warning for years that “models will start breaking everything.” He described it to Business Insider as a “cat and mouse” game, where each model iteration can break whatever the previous model fixed.

In a world where people manage their health — or corporations manage logistics — with AI agents, Polosukhin sees a need for a backend trust and security layer meant to guard against those risks.

At NEAR, Polosukhin is building infrastructure to reduce AI agents’ dependence on a single company, such as a frontier AI lab, for controlling and overseeing every step of a task.

In practice, that could mean an AI agent — one that handles your login information, books your travel, and moves money to pay for an airline ticket — wouldn’t require a user to blindly trust a single gatekeeper.

“This is going to have all your information,” Polosukhin said of AI models handling data. “Literally, your life will be there. So you don’t want any singular company to have control or access to this.”

Another risk Polosukhin wants to guard against is manipulation. People are increasingly using AI to get information, from news summaries to investment suggestions. An AI lab, or a malicious actor within it, could quietly shape those answers, Polosukhin said.

One example came last year from xAI, when Grok repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in unrelated responses after what the company said was an “unauthorized modification” to its backend.

Polosukhin’s pitch with NEAR is to develop an open-source, auditable platform that gives users greater visibility into how an AI system operates, rather than treating it as a black box.

Supervision is what AI still needs

At the moment, his own agents are not fully trustworthy.

Polosukhin showed Business Insider how one of his agents can aggregate news around the US-Iran ceasefire and provide market reads. Others are “developer agents” that code and a “growth agent” that can propose steps to increase a certain metric at his company.

As helpful as they are, Polosukhin doesn’t let an AI off leash. The researcher said AI systems still need careful attention.

In his view, AI still struggles with sound judgment, even as online conversations about it can overhype its current progress.

“If I just let it go and run and do things, I come back to something that makes no sense,” he said of AI models. “So you need to babysit it with your judgment.”




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

I’m a 78-year-old retiree who’s vibe coding. Being out of the workforce doesn’t mean we can’t use AI like tech pros.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lewis Dickson, a 78-year-old retiree and technology consultant. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been in technology for a long time. I worked for IBM in the late 1970s. I did technology consulting for a Fortune 500 company in Atlanta from 2015 to 2024. I’ve taught many engineers and customers over the years.

I’m in semi-retirement mode now. Technology isn’t work to me — it’s fun.

When ChatGPT came out, I jumped on it. About six or eight months ago, when vibe coding became hot, I said, “Well, I need to try this out.”

I researched and found Emergent. What I liked is that they had the full stack. I didn’t have to connect anything or get my developers on the line to handle the back-end. I could just get on there and start.

I began with a couple of simple things. Now I’ve probably done a dozen or more vibe-coded apps.

The last two were for this AED company. They wanted the ability to access their existing camera provider’s website and extract their data. So I vibe-coded an app that would do that — pull that data in.

I also vibe-coded an AI voice app for them. It’s a web app, so you go to it on your phone, hit a button, and ask, “What’s our AED status?” It checks the database, then returns the information.

When I first showed the CEO a demo, he lit up. He thought it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.

Older people can move fast

Most people think an old guy like me would have a flip phone.

When I started as a ham radio operator at 13, I was using Morse code on tubes, transmitters, and receivers. To go from that to what we’ve gone through with phones and cellphones, and then to watch that transition over the years into AI and be closely involved, I just love the technology — both the hardware and the software.

A lot of young kids today are into software but don’t know much about the hardware piece. Having a wide background comes in handy.

There’s often an assumption that gray hair means outdated technology skills. I understand where that perception comes from, but it’s not always accurate.

Many of us have moved just as quickly with the rise of AI as younger professionals. The advantage we bring is perspective: decades of experience that allow us to apply AI strategically, not just technically.

Some people would say older people retire and lose purpose. I’ve never had that problem because I’ve always had a passion for doing technical things.

I’m constantly on my laptop and phone, doing something related to AI and learning. You’ve got to watch a lot of YouTube and social media, learn what’s coming and what’s new.

How seniors can use AI for everyday life

I’m teaching AI to seniors now. In my class back in November, we were talking about data centers, what’s behind AI.

There’s a lady named Sue who’s 100 years old. Near the end of the class, Sue came up and asked, “What’s a semiconductor?”

I have a hardware background, so I answered her question at a very high level. She listened intently and wrote down a few notes.

After that class, I thought, “I need to do more for her.” So I used AI to create a video that went through the evolution of tubes in the 20s and 30s — things they could relate to — and old radios and TVs. Then we went to transistors in the late 40s and 50s, and what that meant.

The seniors I taught have now learned enough to take over their internal resident newsletter and use AI to help write it. They also created images for the newsletter with AI.

They are using AI to shop, check for bargains, and research their items.

I’ve shown them how to recognize different plants and birds with AI. They’ll walk through their garden area, take a picture, and ask ChatGPT or Gemini.

Do you have a story to share about vibe coding? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.




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I visited Punch, the famous baby monkey, in Japan. Here’s what TikTok doesn’t show.

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Since moving to Tokyo last year, my friends back in New York have made a habit of sending me viral posts about Japan. That’s how I first learned about Punch, the baby monkey abandoned by his mother and now cared for by zookeepers at Ichikawa City Zoo, east of Tokyo.

Videos of Punch — a 7-month-old Japanese macaque — clinging to an Ikea orangutan have racked up millions of views on TikTok. The hashtag #HangInTherePunch has gone viral.

Javier Quiñones, commercial manager at Ingka Group, which operates Ikea stores worldwide, told Business Insider that Ikea has seen sales of the Djungelskog orangutan toy increase.

“The toy has long been one of our most sought-after across markets, and the story from Japan is now giving it a little extra love,” he said.


Woman wearing a facemask and earphones riding a train in Japan.

It took Hashimoto 2 hours to get there: three trains and a 30-minute walk.

Provided by Reeno Hashimoto



On a recent Friday afternoon, I visited the zoo

I expected other fans to be making the trek, but I didn’t spot a single rider headed for the zoo. The trains were packed at first — commuters with suitcases bound for Narita Airport, salarymen, uniformed schoolkids — but by the time we reached sleepy Ichikawa Station, most had cleared out.

Getting there took just under 2 hours: three trains and a 30-minute walk. The zoo-bound bus doesn’t run on weekdays.

Near the entrance, I began spotting both foreign and Japanese visitors climbing out of taxis, clutching monkey stuffed animals. It was obvious who they were there to see.


Entrance to the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan.

Admission fee to the zoo was $2.80.

Provided by Reeno Hashimoto



Heading into the zoo

I paid the 440-yen, or $2.80, admission fee and made my way to Monkey Mountain, passing a mosaic mural of animals along the path.

There were rows of people lined up around a blue iron fence, phones raised, waiting to capture Punch in action. Spectators oohed as other monkeys climbed the rocky structure to play with a silver chain affixed to the top.

The air smelled of manure. The enclosure itself was stark — rocky, with little vegetation, more concrete jungle than mountainside.


Watching Japanese macaques at Ichikawa City Zoo.

Both foreign and Japanese visitors were at the zoo.

Provided by Reeno Hashimoto



Some of the monkeys appeared thin, even balding

Punch, by contrast, looked healthy, his fur darker and thicker than the others’. Visitors laughed when he leapt from a rock to the monkey bars.

He isn’t the only baby in the exhibit, but he appears to be the smallest. Mostly, he keeps to himself, occasionally playing with a slightly larger one.

A woman from Canada, wearing a Yankees hat and visiting with her family, told me she’d seen Punch playing with his Ikea toy earlier and interacting with the others.

“We didn’t see any monkey fights,” she said. “We don’t love zoos and were a little concerned about supporting one if it doesn’t have the best enclosures. They could use some improvements, but it was better than I thought.”


Monkey Mountain at Ichikawa City Zoo.

A troop of macaques at Monkey Mountain.

Provided by Reeno Hashimoto



After about 10 minutes, the troop grew restless.

“Lunchtime,” someone nearby said in Japanese.

The monkeys scrambled upward. Punch returned to the monkey bars. A slightly larger monkey barreled into him, knocking him off balance, but he quickly recovered.

A group of heavily made-up girls in Japanese high school uniforms arrived, giggling. “Yabai,” they whispered. “Kawaii.”


A man holding a monkey stuffed toy at Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan.

Visitors at the zoo were holding their own stuffed toys.

Provided by Reeno Hashimoto



Notably, Punch wasn’t clutching his orangutan.

The toy sat abandoned on the other side of the enclosure.

At 2:50 p.m., the monkeys began clamoring for food, climbing the door and hanging from the rails. Then a young man in a blue uniform entered.

Punch immediately climbed onto the zookeeper’s leg as he circled the enclosure, scattering orange and yellow pellets. Within minutes, the food was gone.

The zookeeper returned with what looked like grass. This time, Punch perched on his shoulder as they made another lap before disappearing into a back room together.


A zookeeper at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan.

Another zookeeper at the Ichikawa City Zoo.

Provided by Reeno Hashimoto



Around me, spectators wondered whether Punch would reappear before closing. Most were young adults — students and couples, some in coordinated outfits — clearly here for a photo.

I asked a zookeeper if he had time to answer a few questions, but he said the staff was overwhelmed by Punch’s popularity and too busy to respond, even to email inquiries.

Then an announcement crackled over the loudspeaker: Monkey Mountain was getting crowded. Visitors were asked to limit their stay to 10 minutes.

Punch’s fame was being rationed in 10-minute increments.


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Microsoft manager explains how she pivoted from admin to AI — and doesn’t regret her English degree

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brit Morenus, a 37-year-old senior AI gamification program manager, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been at Microsoft for a total of 13 years, but for five and a half, I was a contract worker.

I graduated from college with a degree focused on English, communications, and marketing. I first landed a job at Microsoft as a contract executive assistant. I stayed in that role for about eight months, then joined the marketing team.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to take a really special position, but it required knowing gamification. Gamification is about integrating game mechanics and motivators, such as storytelling and reward systems, into learning. So I was going to teach people about our products and sell them in a gamified way.

I spent about a year getting certifications that taught me about gamification. I upskilled and learned how to create games, what game mechanics are, and what motivates someone when they’re learning.

That was the position where I was able to prove my impact, and they decided to bring me on full-time. I stayed in that role for another six years, training the frontline and customer service support to develop the right sales skills.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to start gamifying learning about AI. They wanted someone with gamification skills, and my certifications and experience made me the ideal candidate.

I didn’t know much about AI yet, aside from using it for personal reasons, but transitioning to an AI role was actually faster than pivoting to gamification. Since I held the gamification role for about six years, I became really good at it. It only took about three months for me to upskill in AI.

In my first three months on the team, I made myself knowledgeable about AI to the point where I could teach others about it. That’s when I got a certification in Azure AI Fundamentals. It was a certification specific to how Microsoft’s AI works.

I helped my entire team get it, and then I helped my entire organization start working on it. Then I helped the greater customer service support organization work toward getting it as well.

Get outside your comfort zone

My advice to those who want to transition would be: Don’t let fear keep you from stepping outside your comfort zone. There’s so much ambiguity about changing roles or companies, but there’s no time like the present.

With AI specifically, you just need to learn. Everyone already uses it, but you need to understand how it works, because that’s how you can understand what to do with it.

It’s also important to upskill yourself. You have to be willing to constantly move and learn more, because it’s going to keep changing — and faster than you can grasp it. Sometimes AI makes wrong predictions, but it is using words to make that prediction. So I absolutely need to use my English degree in order to figure out keywords and how to prompt it to do the right thing.

I don’t regret my English degree

Up until this Al role, I always joked that I wasn’t using my English degree. But now I use it everywhere, and it truly does help. It helps with things like talking to executives and also with the role itself.

It’s important to know the language of AI and how it operates. So now, more than ever, I am using every bit of my English degree and understanding English, grammar, and how it all functions.

For example, there’s a tagging process that happens behind the scenes with AI, just like on social media. Looking at an image, it might tag it as a woman, or a supermarket, and that gives it a confidence score and tells you if it’s relevant or not, and if it’s what we’re looking for.

A lot of it is more about understanding how to apply the English language than about AI — so, thanks, Mom and Dad, I am using the degree you paid for.

This is part of an ongoing series about workers who transitioned into AI roles. Did you pivot to AI? We want to hear from you. Reach out to the reporter via email at aaltchek@insider.com or secure-messaging platform Signal at aalt.19.




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Elon Musk is in a black suit jacket and a black graphic t-shirt on stage. He is looking to the top left corner of the image.

Elon Musk says Anthropic’s philosopher has no stake in the future because she doesn’t have kids. Here’s her response.

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Marc Piasecki/Getty Images

  • Anthropic’s resident philosopher, Amanda Askell, helps shape Claude’s personality and morals.
  • Elon Musk said she’s not qualified because she doesn’t have kids and no stake in the future.
  • Askell had thoughts.

Anthropic famously employs a Scottish philosopher named Amanda Askell.

Her job is to imbue its chatbot, Claude, with a personality and a set of moral guardrails. She is essentially teaching it to be cool and good.

Elon Musk, however, doesn’t think she’s qualified.

“Those without children lack a stake in the future,” Musk posted on X in response to a profile of Askell published by The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal profile does not say whether Askell has kids. Musk, who has imbued his own chatbot, Grok, with a distinct personality, has 14 of them. Musk is known for promoting a brand of pronatalism that’s become popular among Silicon Valley elites.

Askell responded with her trademark dry intellectualism.

“I think it depends on how much you care about people in general vs. your own kin,” Askell wrote. “I do intend to have kids, but I still feel like I have a strong personal stake in the future because I care a lot about people thriving, even if they’re not related to me.”

“I think caring about your children can make you feel invested in the future in a new and very profound way, and I do understand people wanting to convey that,” she added.

The responses to their short back-and-forth were as varied as you might expect on Musk’s social media network. A day later, Askell posted again.

“I’m too right wing for the left and I’m too left wing for the right,” she said. “I’m too into humanities for those in tech and I’m too into tech for those in the humanities. What I’m learning is that failing to polarize is itself quite polarizing.”




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Katie Notopoulos

Coming off your parents’ family phone plan doesn’t make you an adult

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Before you yell at me, let me first say that I am not, and have never been, on my parents’ cellphone plan. (I didn’t get a cellphone until I was already an adult.) But I’ve long been jealous of my friends who are still on their parents’ plans — it just makes good sense!

Yahoo News recently asked whether staying on your parents’ phone plan as a 40-year-old makes you “a harmless mooch or a generational failure?”

The reporter, Fortesa Latifi, admits that she and her husband were still on their parents’ plans until recently, and that many others are like her, some even with children of their own, and quite a few feel embarrassed about it.

There are significant savings to be had by joining a family plan. For example, right now, at T-Mobile, its unlimited talk, text, and data plan costs $85 for an individual plan. For a family of four, the same plan is around $42 per person.

Why are family plans so much cheaper per line? It’s not that there are a lot more costs to operate cell service if a phone number isn’t connected to a family plan. It’s all about how advantageous it is for the carrier to sell family plans.

For one thing, if you’re part of a family plan, you’re less likely to shop around and switch carriers. It’s also easier on the carrier’s customer service: They only have to mail bills, process credit cards each month, and all that jazz for one person instead of several. (Verizon and T-Mobile didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on their pricing.)

Last year, AT&T added a new feature that makes it easier to automatically split the bill for people who share a friends-and-family account. The person whose name is on the bill is still ultimately responsible for the full amount, so enter into this kind of arrangement only with people you really trust.

AT&T pointed me to a news story published last year that quoted an exec saying 85% of their customers were on a multi-line plan. Think about that — that means if you actually are one of the suckers who is paying for a single line, you’re in the vast minority.

There’s no honor in paying more to have the bill in your own name — you’re just paying more for the same services. Does your dignity and independence win out here, or does T-Mobile? Hmm?

Does having your own cellphone line make you an adult?

AT&T released its own study (so take it with a grain of salt) that said that 76% of Americans think that coming off a parent’s cellphone plan is one of the “ultimate signs” of becoming an adult.

Sure, at first glance, this seems like a rite of passage into financial independence from your parents.

Is it a smart financial choice?

Consider that the T-Mobile plan — even if you paid back your mom each month for your portion of the phone bill, you’d be saving about $42.50 a month compared to the same service on an individual plan. That’s $5,100 over a decade if you did it from age 22 to 32.

In fact, I’d say that part of becoming an adult is being smart about spending habits and money. And sticking to a family plan is the obviously wise choice.

If you choose to remove yourself from a family plan, you’re just giving the cellphone carriers twice as much — and I see little glory or pride in that.

Look, of course, this all depends on your relationship with your family. You may not want to have this financial tie to them, and you may be in a better financial situation than your parents. But bundling phone lines with other people, whether they’re your family or just some friends, makes a lot of financial sense.

Millennials, it’s time to take pride in one smart financial decision that our generation is making. Embrace it! Be proud to be on a family plan!




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