AWS offers its salespeople new incentives for selling AI products Q and Bedrock.
AWS faces intense competition from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
AWS sales teams have specific performance targets for AI products.
Amazon is giving more reasons for its salespeople to hawk AI products.
Amazon Web Services recently put a new incentive program in place for its flagship AI products, Q and Bedrock, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
In cloud computing and enterprise software, companies maintain massive sales teams that market to corporate customers and help them integrate technology offerings. When big tech companies change incentives for these salespeople, it often signals new strategies or updated tactics.
For Amazon, it's facing intense competition from AI and cloud rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. This has put AWS in an all-hands-on-deck situation to beef up its AI business.
For the chatbot Q, AWS is offering a $1,000 bonus for the first 25 licenses sold and retained for three straight months with the same customer. The rewards max out at $20,000 per customer.
Those who sell Bedrock, Amazon's AI development platform, are given a bonus of $5,000 for small customers and $10,000 for bigger customers when they "achieve 3 consecutive months of specified Bedrock incremental usage in 2024," the memo explained.
The bonuses are one of the several tactics AWS is using to boost its AI sales, as BI previously reported.
Some AWS teams are also considering higher pay for AI specialists in some job categories, BI previously reported. At the same time, AWS sales teams now have specific performance targets tied to AI products.
The company also recently rolled out a new internal sales campaign, called "Find One, Launch One, Ramp One," that encourages traditionally non-sales roles to actively sell AI products.
An AWS spokesperson told BI that every major tech company provides similar sales incentives and Amazon continually evaluates compensation against the market.
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The Houthis wrote "hypersonic" on their new Palestine 2 missile.
Houthi media/Screengrab via X
A Houthi ballistic missile reached Israel from Yemen, disintegrating after air defenses activated.
The attack highlights the threat posed by Houthi rebels and offers Iran insights on Israel's defenses.
Israel's Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems intercepted the missile, questioning its hypersonic claim.
A Houthi ballistic missile reached Israel from Yemen for the first time on Sunday, disintegrating in the air after Israel activated its air defenses. While the attack failed to cause any casualties or significant damage, it shows the heightened threat the Houthi rebels can pose and likely offers their Iranian backers insights about Israel's missile defenses.
"I believe Iran will view the attack as having symbolic value, but still reflecting the limited capabilities of Iranian-produced ballistic missiles in actually threatening Israel," Sim Tack, a military and geopolitical analyst, told Business Insider.
The Israeli military confirmed Tuesday that it had launched several interceptor missiles at the Houthi projectile on Sunday morning. These include Arrow 2, part of the upper tier of Israel's multilayered air defenses.
"It has become known now that at least one Arrow interceptor managed to hit but only damaged the incoming missile, but this was still sufficient to prevent the missile from reaching its target," Tack said. "On the part of Israel, the attack will likely spur additional thought on procedures to address these recurring threats and the possibility of large ballistic missiles falling on Israeli soil in case interceptions are not entirely successful."
The Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 both made their first-ever combat intercepts against Houthis missiles on October 31 and November 9, 2023, respectively. The Arrow 3 fires an intercept missile that strikes an incoming ballistic missile outside the Earth's atmosphere, and boasts superior range and speed over its Arrow 2 predecessor. It is also a hit-to-kill missile, while the Arrow 2 destroys incoming targets by exploding nearby.
The Israeli military, which said it would probe why the Arrow failed to destroy the incoming threat on Sunday, also disputed the Houthis dubious claim that the missile is hypersonic – the group even painted the word "hypersonic" in English on it.
The missile the Houthis fired Sunday at Israel appears to be an Iranian-made weapon with solid fuel.
Handout/Houthi Media Center via Getty Images
Hypersonic missiles are a class of developing weapons that can maneuver at speeds faster than Mach 5 to evade intercept missiles; there's no evidence the Houthi-fired missile is in the class beyond its paint job.
The Houthis dubbed the missile Palestine 2, which analysts believe might be a "hybrid" of the short-range Iranian Fateh-110 and Kheibar Shekan medium-range ballistic missiles. The group has previously paraded mockups of both the Fateh-110 and Kheibar Shaken.
The first Palestine missile, which closely resembles the one used in Sunday's attack, was unveiled in June, with the Houthis claiming it was used for an attack against the southern Israeli port city of Eilat. The Palestine missiles are solid-propellent, making them more advanced than the liquid-propellent ballistic missiles hitherto used by the group.
"I assume that the Houthis are always hopeful that their missiles may break through the Israeli air and missile defenses, but this missile was not fundamentally different from previous types that were launched at Israel," Tack said. "So at best it would appear this was a repeat attempt, and of course a source for propaganda statements regardless of the outcome of such attacks."
Sunday's missile went on a straight trajectory, traveling approximately 1,200 miles from Yemen and reaching Israeli airspace in under 12 minutes. In July, the Houthis managed to hit Tel Aviv with an extended-range Samad drone for the first time, killing one. The drone flew on a less direct and predictable 16-hour route of 1,600 miles, approaching Israel from the west and catching its air defenses off guard.
"At least at the moment, it seems more probable that the isolated nature of the attack — one missile — may not have been seen as a threat by Israel's air defense network to spur a sustained response," Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, told BI.
"Israel does claim to have intercepted the missile, so I don't think anyone can conclude that it slipped by on its own accord," Bohl said. "Rather, its geographic range from Yemen is probably the most notable part, as it indicates that Yemen is a viable pathway for such long-range attacks by Iran and its allies and proxies."
Most Houthi missiles and drones are based on Iranian designs. Iran attacked Israel directly for the first time in April 2024, launching an enormous ballistic missile and drone barrage in retaliation for Israel's assassination of Iranian officers in Syria. Iran telegraphed that unprecedented attack in advance, and Israel, with help from its allies, intercepted the vast majority of the incoming munitions successfully. The few Iranian Emad missiles that did reach their target, a large airbase in southern Israel, also proved significantly less accurate than previously estimated.
"When it comes to large-scale drone and missile attacks, Iran has to rely on large volumes to try and overwhelm Israeli air and missile defenses," Tack said.
"If Tehran could achieve strategic surprise in such an overwhelming attack, it is possible that even more missiles would make it through the Israeli defenses, but the recent attacks hardly impact that reasoning or knowledge," Tack added.
Unless the Houthis are capable of firing more advanced missiles simultaneously, it's doubtful they can achieve anything more than an "occasional lucky hit" against their distant enemy, Tack said.
"For the Houthis, the attack — successful or not — is a political achievement that serves their domestic goals. It will drive recruitment and allow them to deploy this as propaganda," Bohl said. "They certainly have learned that Israel's air defenses are robust, but they probably didn't glean much more from the incident than they already knew from the April 2024 incident with Iran."
For Israel, the RANE analyst pointed out that using other, less expensive systems than the Arrow 3 makes sense for attacks with singular or small numbers of missiles. By doing so, Israel can preserve the Arrow 3 for combating larger, more challenging, and technologically sophisticated attacks.
In addition to Arrow and the short-range Iron Dome, Israel operates the David's Sling system, which covers the mid-tier of its air defense. It decided to begin retiring its older, American-made Patriot PAC-2 systems earlier this year.
Given their geographical distance from Israel, the Houthis are unlikely to become a priority over other Iran-backed militias in the current conflict, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has a vast arsenal of surface-to-surface missiles.
"The Houthis are growing as a threat against Israel, and if there is a sustained supply of such missiles from Iran, it could rival Hezbollah in terms of threat with major attacks," Bohl said.
"But that requires a sustained build-up that I think is still far-off," Bohl added. "For now, Iran, followed by Hezbollah, are the most direct threats to Israel via rockets and missiles."
Steven Horrell, a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, believes Sunday's attack was "very illustrative of the overall positions" in both Iran and Israel.
"For Iran, the Houthi proxies and others remain a cost-effective and consequence-free way to disrupt the international rules-based order and to hit at Israel," Horrell told BI.
"For Israel, there is a high level of confidence in the multi-layer missile defense — but this is a reminder that it is not perfect; the risk is never brought down to zero," Horrell said.
While the US Navy has intercepted numerous Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea, the CEPA fellow argued these measures equate to "shooting down arrows and not taking out the archer."
Lebanese army explosives experts work on preparing the site to explode a walkie-talkie that they found thrown away a day after several devices exploded.
Photo by Stringer/picture alliance via Getty Images
Pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members blew up across Lebanon this week.
The attacks, an apparent supply chain infiltration, have been attributed to Israel.
Two former spies said the operation showed tactical mastery.
Scores of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Hezbollah militant group exploded across Lebanon this week, leaving dozens of people dead and thousands more injured and raising the potential for escalation between two bitter enemies.
Emerging details from the sophisticated attack, in which the personal, handheld devices carried by militants were rigged with tiny explosives, reveals a textbook covert operation, former American and Israeli spies told Business Insider.
"We are looking at something that has been a very carefully, very thoroughly, well-calculated, meticulously tailored process," said Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, who likened it to a "long-term chess game."
The attacks appear to have blinded the militancy's communications but the strategic objectives of the coordinated blasts remain unclear, leading to questions about timing and intent.
The chaos and carnage began on Tuesday when pagers used by Hezbollah members started beeping before they exploded en masse across Lebanon. The following day, walkie-talkies used by the Iran-backed militant group followed a similar fate as they started detonating in large numbers.
A photo taken on September 18 in Beirut's southern suburbs shows the remains of exploded pagers.
AFP via Getty Images
The back-to-back attacks killed at least 30 people and injured some 3,000 more, including Hezbollah fighters, and overwhelmed local hospitals.
Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Iran all blamed Israel for the deadly attacks. Israel has not claimed responsibility, but the country has a long history of carrying out clandestine operations beyond its borders. It quickly became the leading suspect behind the blasts, with some media reports that the Israelis were behind the events.
Israel assassinated a Hamas bombmaker in 1996 with an exploding phone, but what's different in these attacks is that thousands of devices were rigged and exploded simultaneously.
While the extent of the attack is still being determined, the level of sophistication is becoming clearer.
Earlier this year, the leader of the militant group, Hassan Nasrallah, decided it was better to avoid using cellphones because they could be too easily tracked and monitored by Israel's vaunted intelligence services. They began switching to older devices like pagers — creating an opening for their enemy.
Smoke billows from a house in Baalbek in east Lebanon after a reported explosion of a radio device on September 18.
Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images
The pagers and walkie-talkies reportedly had small amounts of explosives concealed within, rigged to blow at one point during the supply chain process in what clearly required extensive planning dating many back months — if not years.
Carrying this out required technical mastery on a large scale. The operatives needed to insert the explosives and detonator without leaving traces on the devices and do so quickly enough to avoid affecting shipment dates in a way that could arouse suspicion, all the time knowing just one sloppy pager could give thousands away.
Hezbollah failed to detect the tampered devices in time, likely by failing to properly scan them or take them apart and inspect their components.
Melamed, the former Israeli intel officer who's the founder of the Inside the Middle East organization, said maintaining the edge over an adversary is not just about having technological advantages.
It's more important to have "ingenuity" and the ability to plan several moves ahead of an adversary, he noted. He said this was a notable component of the attacks this week.
Ambulances are surrounded by people at the entrance of the American University of Beirut Medical Center on September 17.
Photo by Anwar AMRO/AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images
But if Israel is indeed behind the attack, it raises questions about why the country would have chosen to detonate the explosives now after going through all the trouble of such a sophisticated and lengthy infiltration process.
"Supply chain operations are hard," said Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer with experience in the Middle East. "When you have this success, it's incredible. You hold on to it and don't expose it."
Hezbollah will investigate the massive security breach and plug the necessary holes, making it more difficult for an adversary to carry out another supply chain operation in the future, added London, author of "The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence."
The attacks began shortly after Israel indicated, without specificity, that it would increase military pressure on Hezbollah so that people who have been displaced by constant fighting between the two bitter enemies can return to their homes.
Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged near-daily cross-border strikes since Hamas staged its October 7 massacre, forcing tens of thousands of people in northern Israel and southern Lebanon from their homes. The two warring parties have avoided all-out confrontation despite constant fears that escalation would lead to that scenario.
An Israeli fighter jet takes off at an unidentified location to conduct strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, in this handout photo released September 19.
Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
The pager and walkie-talkie attacks were certainly disruptive and would have made Hezbollah vulnerable to immediate Israeli military action, experts say. But if the blasts are supposed to precede an Israeli ground offensive into Lebanon, that does not yet appear to be the case.
"Relatively, the gains don't seem to merit the exposure of this capability," London said.
He said this capability could have been a tool for more strategic goals like collecting intelligence on Hezbollah's membership, facilities, weaponry, and movement. Such advantages could have then translated into precision attacks instead of causing indiscriminate casualties for psychological effects.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that the war is now in a "new phase" and "the sequence of our military actions will continue." On Friday, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged more fire.
Whether Israel is headed for a ground invasion of Lebanon remains to be seen. Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said there may not be a direct correlation between the device explosions this week and any Israeli invasion.
"But that doesn't mean that it's not something that could happen in the immediate future," he said. "This was such an extensive and so bold an operation that it was designed to knock Hezbollah off balance for a period of time. They'll obviously recover, but not soon."
Nike has tapped its veteran executive Elliott Hill to be its new CEO.
Nike, NurPhoto/Getty Images
Nike's incoming CEO is an old face at the firm, having joined as an intern in 1988.
Over the course of more than 30 years, he worked his way up to top management before retiring in 2020.
Management experts say that a Nike veteran helming the company could help turn it around.
Nike's incoming CEO is an old face in the company, having worked his way up the ranks from intern to C-Suite exec.
The sneaker maker has pulled Elliott Hill, one of its company veterans, out of retirement. He's set to take over Nike's outgoing CEO, John Donahoe, who has led the company since 2020. Hill's new appointment will be effective October 14, per the company's statement.
According to Hill's biography, which Nike shared with BI, he started in the company as an apparel sales representative intern in 1988.
He rotated through numerous roles in the company over the course of more than 30 years.
"I started my career at NIKE as an intern in 1988, taking on 19 different roles within the organization before retiring in 2020 as President — Consumer and Marketplace," Hill wrote in his recently-updated LinkedIn bio, as seen by Business Insider.
In a company statement on Thursday, Hill said that Nike has always been a "core part" of his identity.
"I'm eager to reconnect with the many employees and trusted partners I've worked with over the years, and just as excited to build new, impactful relationships that will move us ahead," he said.
Hill's return also appears to be part of a hiring trend where Nike falls back on its company veterans in a bid to turn things around. In June, it hired another retired exec, Tom Peddie. Peddie, who worked at Nike for 30 years, joined as its vice president of marketplace partners.
Hill's depth of experience with the company will benefit Nike, experts say
The company has particularly struggled after it tried to sell directly to sellers, and its relationships with marketplace retailers like Foot Locker soured.
But Nike's now redoubling its focus on retailers. It's boosted partnerships with companies like Designer Brands, Macy's, and Foot Locker, particularly after cracks started to show in its direct-to-consumer sales push.
Management experts BI spoke to said hiring a Nike veteran who knows the company intimately could benefit the company during this crisis.
"A veteran insider like Elliott Hill brings a lot of valuable firsthand experience that could be useful in addressing Nike's current challenges, like rebuilding strained relationships with its retail partners," David Daniels, an assistant professor of management and organization from the National University of Singapore, told BI.
Daniels added, however, that insider CEOs run the risk of being "too deeply entrenched in traditional ways of thinking, which could limit their ability to introduce the kind of bold, innovative strategies that are often needed in a crisis."
"By contrast, outsider CEOs can offer fresh perspectives and a greater diversity of thought, which are important for effectively navigating complex changes," Daniels added.
But Hill's years at the company also mean he knows its structure — and many of the people working there.
Peter Cappelli, a management and human resources professor from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told BI: "That depth, which all CEOs had 40 years ago, means you know who the people are already, who's and who's not."
"You also know what is worth preserving," Cappelli added.
Elliot Hill is returning to Nike, the company where he built his career — and he's got a big job ahead of him.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
But that may be a double-edged sword, too. Cappelli added that there may "be a reluctance to change in ways that hurt people still there, especially former mentors."
Jim Duffy, a Nike analyst for Stifel Institutional, told BI's Lloyd Lee that Hill's return as a Nike insider may well bring about a "revitalization of the Nike culture."
"I also expect you're going to see kind of a renaissance in the innovation and product development process," Duffy added.
Not many CEOs can say that they've worked their way up from interns to the top job in a company. Xerox's former CEO, Ursula Burns, was one of them.
She started working at Xerox in 1980 as a mechanical engineering summer intern while completing a master's degree at Columbia University.
Burns worked her way up from positions in product development and planning to executive assistant and vice president. She was named CEO in July 2009.
Nike representatives did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside business hours.
Edd Coates' Game UI Database was crippled by traffic from an OpenAI IP address.
AI companies are aggressively crawling the web, causing disruptions.
Website owners see cloud bills spike due to AI botnet traffic.
Edd Coates knew something was wrong. His online database was under attack.
Coates is a game designer and the creator of the Game UI Database. It's a labor of love for which he spent five years cataloging more than 56,000 screenshots of video game user interfaces. If you want to know what the health bar looks like in Fallout 3 and compare that to the inventory screen in Breath of the Wild, Coates has you covered.
A few weeks ago, he says, the website slowed to a crawl. It was taking 3 times as long to load pages, users were getting 502 Bad Gateway Errors, and the homepage was being reloaded 200 times a second.
"I assumed it was some sort of petty DDoS attack," Coates told Business Insider.
But when he checked the system logs, he realized the flood of traffic was coming from a single IP address owned by OpenAI.
In the race to build the world's most advanced AI, tech companies have fanned out across the web, releasing botnets like a plague of digital locusts to scour sites for anything they can use to fuel their voracious models.
It's often high quality training data they're after, but also other information that may help AI models understand the world. The race is on to collect as much information as possible before it runs out, or the rules change on what's acceptable.
One study estimated that the world's supply of usable AI training data could be depleted by 2032. The entire online corpus of recorded human experience may soon be inadequate to keep ChatGPT up to date.
A resource like the Game UI Database, where a human has already done the painstaking labor of cleaning and categorizing images, must have looked like an all-you-can-eat-buffet.
Bigger cloud bills
For small website owners with limited resources, the costs of playing host to swarm of hungry bots can present a significant burden.
"Within a space of 10 minutes we were transferring around 60 to 70 gigabytes of data," said Jay Peet, a fellow game designer who manages the servers that host the Coates' database. "Based on Amazon's on-demand bandwidth pricing that would cost $850 per day."
Coates makes no money from the Game UI Database and in fact operates the site at a loss, but he worries that the actions of giant AI companies may endanger independent creators who rely on their websites to make a living.
"The fact that OpenAI's behavior has crippled my website to the point where it stopped functioning is just the cherry on top," he said.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company's bot was querying Coates' website roughly twice per second. The representative also stressed that OpenAI was crawling the site as part of an effort to understand the web's structure. It wasn't there to scrape data.
"We make it easy for web publishers to opt out of our ecosystem and express their preferences on how their sites and content work with our products," the spokesperson added. "We've also built systems to detect and moderate site load to be courteous and considerate web participants."
Planetary problems
Joshua Gross, founder of digital product studio Planetary, told BI that he encountered a similar problem after redesigning a website for one of his clients. Shortly after launch, traffic jumped and the client saw their cloud computing costs double from previous months.
"An audit of traffic logs revealed a significant amount of traffic from scraping bots," Gross said. "The problem was primarily Anthropic driving an overwhelming amount of nonsense traffic," he added, referring to repeated requests all resulting in 404 errors.
Jennifer Martinez, a spokesperson for Anthropic said the company strives to make sure its data-collection efforts are transparent and not intrusive or disruptive.
Eventually, Gross said, he was able to stem the deluge of traffic by updating the site's robots.txt code. Robots.txt is protocol, in use since the late 1990s, that lets bot crawlers know where they can and can't go. It is widely accepted as one of the unofficial rules of the web.
Blocking AI bots
Robots.txt restrictions aimed at AI companies have skyrocketed. One study found that between April 2023 and April 2024, nearly 5% of all online data and about 25% of the highest quality data added robots.txt restrictions for AI botnets.
The same study found that 25.9% of such restrictions were for OpenAI, compared to 13.3% for Anthropic, and 9.8% for Google. The authors also found that many data owners banned crawling in their Terms of Service, but did not have robots.txt restrictions in place. That has left them vulnerable to unwanted crawling from bots that rely solely on robots.txt.
OpenAI and Anthropic have said their bots respect robots.txt but BI has reported instances in the recent past in which both companies have bypassed the restrictions.
Key metrics polluted
David Senecal, a principal product architect for fraud and abuse at networking giant Akamai, says his firm tracks AI training botnets managed by Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. He says among Akamai's users the bots are controversial.
"Website owners are generally fine with having their data indexed by web search engines like Googlebot or Bingbot," Senecal said, "however, some do not like the idea of their data being used to train a model."
He says some users complain about increased cloud costs or stability issues from the increased traffic. Others worry the botnets present intellectual property issues or will "pollute key metrics" like conversion rates.
When an AI bot is swarming your website over and over, your traffic metrics will likely be out of whack with reality. That's causes problems for sites that advertise online and need to track how effective this marketing is.
Senecal says robots.txt is still the best way to manage unwanted crawling and scraping, though it's an imperfect solution. It requires domain creators to know the specific names of every single bot they want to block, and it requires the bot operators to comply voluntarily. On top of that, Senecal says Akamai tracks various "impersonator" bots that parade as Anthropic or OpenAI web crawlers, making the task of parsing through them even harder.
In some cases, Senecal says, botnets will crawl an entire website every day just to see what's changed, a blunt approach that results in massive amounts of duplicated data.
"This way of collecting data is very wasteful," he said, "but until the mindset on data sharing changes and a more evolved and mature way to share data exists, scraping will remain the status quo."
"We are not Google"
Roberto Di Cosmo is the director of Software Heritage, a non-profit database created to "collect, preserve and share all publicly available source code for the benefit of society."
Di Cosmo says this past summer he saw an unprecedented surge in AI botnets scraping the online database, causing the website to become unresponsive for some users. His engineers spent hours identifying and blacklisting thousands of IP addresses that were driving the traffic, diverting resources away from other important tasks.
"We are not Google, we have a limited amount of resources to run this operation," Di Cosmo said.
He's an evangelist for open access, and not in theory opposed to AI companies using the database to train models. Software Heritage already has a partnership with Hugging Face, which used the database to help train its AI model StarCoder2.
"Developing machine-learning models that encompass these digital commons can democratize software creation, enabling a wider audience to benefit from the digital revolution, a goal that aligns with our values," Di Cosmo said, "but it must be done in a responsible way."
Software Heritage has published a set of principles governing how and when it agrees to share its data. All models created using the database must be open-source and not "monopolized for private gain." And the creators of the underlying code must be able to opt out if they wish.
"Sometimes, these people get the data anyway," Di Cosmo said, referring to botnets that scrape hundreds of billions of web pages one by one.
Getting taken offline
"We have been taken offline a couple of times due to AI bots," said Tania Cohen, chief executive of 360Giving, a non-profit database of grants and charitable giving opportunities.
Cohen says that as a small charity with no in-house technical team, the surges in traffic have been highly disruptive. What's even more frustrating, she says, is that much of the information is easily downloadable in other ways and doesn't need to be crawled.
But hungry AI botnets scrape first, ask questions later.
"Utterly sick"
Coates says his Game UI Database is back up and running and he continues to add to it. There are millions of people out there like Coates, obsessive about some tiny corner of the world, compelled to sink thousands of hours into a pursuit that no one else on Earth could find meaning in. It's one of the reasons to love the internet.
And it's yet another area of society buffeted by the ripple effects of the AI revolution. The server costs of a small-fry database operator may seem not worth mentioning. But Coates' story is emblematic of a bigger question: When AI comes to change the world, who bears the cost?
Coates says he maintains the database as a source of reference material for fellow game designers. He worries that generative AI, which depends on the work of human creators, will inevitably replace those very same creators.
"To find that my work is not only being stolen by a large organization, but used to hurt the very people I'm trying to help, makes me feel utterly sick," Coates said.
Warren Buffett plans to park his fortune in a charitable trust when he dies.
Getty Images / Bill Pugliano
Warren Buffett's riches will go to a charitable trust controlled by his three children when he dies.
He's avoiding taxes and making his kids into philanthropic titans, a wealth inequality guru says.
Vast personal fortunes distort democracy and suggest the system has failed, Chuck Collins told BI.
Warren Buffett lives a simple life, steers clear of politics, and has gifted more than half of his vast fortune to good causes, promising that virtually all the rest will follow.
Yet even the 94-year-old investor who runs Berkshire Hathaway is cutting out the taxman and setting his children up to wield massive influence once he's gone, an expert on wealth inequality tells Business Insider.
Chuck Collins is the director of the inequality program at the Institute for Policy Studies, and the author of "The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Spend Millions to Hide Trillions."
Collins' responses have been edited for length and clarity.
There are more than a dozen people each worth more than $100 billion. What do you think about that?
These concentrations of wealth are a reflection of a system failure. A healthy capitalist and democratic society must put some brake on the concentration of wealth and power to prevent it from distorting democracy.
Forty years of tax, wage, and other policies have funneled wealth to the top — rather than see it broadly distributed through higher wages for workers or paying a fair share of taxes.
Chuck Collins is author of "The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Spend Millions to Hide Trillions."
Chuck Collins
What do you think about someone like Warren Buffett, who lives a relatively simple life and has pledged to give virtually all of his vast fortune away?
Buffett is not a conspicuous consumer. Even his private jet was initially named the "Indefensible." And Buffett does less to aggressively wield his power and influence in the public sphere. You don't see his name on the list of big political donors. And he and Bill Gates started The Giving Pledge to encourage other billionaires to give to philanthropy.
But most of Buffett's wealth will flow in the form of donations to the tax-exempt family foundations run by his three kids, rather than paying estate taxes or taxes on appreciated gains. On the positive side, he's not creating private wealth dynasties. But his children will become philanthropic titans by wielding taxpayer-subsidized private power through enormous charitable foundations upon his death.
Buffett has gifted Berkshire stock worth billions to his children's charities since 2006. He plans to give almost all his remaining $140 billion fortune to a charitable trust when he dies. His three kids will be the named trustees and will have to agree unanimously on how the money is used.
How would you tackle the problem of wealth inequality at a scale where individuals can amass net worth of $100 billion-plus?
As a society, we should adapt several public policies to discourage such democracy-distorting levels of private wealth:
1. A progressive annual wealth tax, with rates becoming steeper as wealth goes above $1 billion.
2. A meaningful inheritance tax, taxing wealth transfers at death. For this to be effective, we have to crack down on the massive wealth-hiding industry.
3. A cap on the charitable deduction so that wealthy people, like Buffett, don't get to opt out entirely of paying taxes.
Madonna Hanna won gold at this year's Senior Games for sprinting.
Madonna Hanna
At 57, Madonna Hanna could jog for an hour, but had never sprinted.
14 years later, she's a national champion sprinter and says she hasn't reached her peak.
Hanna shared tips for getting fit, no matter your age.
When Madonna Hanna was 57 in 2010, she suddenly got the urge to run. She could already jog for an hour at a time, but she wanted to run fast. Fast forward to this year, and, at the age of 71, Hanna has plenty of medals and a state record for sprinting under her belt.
Hanna, based in Washington State, told Business Insider that when she got the "god-inspired" urge to start sprinting, she turned to her husband for help. The high school track coach got her doing drills like running up and down hills with a weighted backpack and ankle weights.
By 2011, Hanna was fast enough to compete in the Washington State Senior Games, a sports competition for people over 50. The next year, she competed at the National Senior Games, which she has done three more times since. At the 2023 games, she won a gold medal as part of a four-by-100 meter relay team, and this year, she broke the Washington State record for athletes aged 70 to 74 in the 50m sprint.
Although she's almost 15 years older than when she started sprinting, Hanna believes she hasn't reached her peak.
"The last two years with my present coach, he has taken me from the middle of the pack in the National Senior Games to the top five in my age category nationally," she said.
Hanna and her coach, Marcus Chambers, after she won gold at the 2024 Senior Games.
Madonna Hanna
In Hanna's view, "it's never too late to soar for more," and she hopes her story will motivate others to start exercising, no matter how old they are.
Soaring for more is good for our health, too. A 2021 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that people who started exercising later in life had a similarly lowered risk of dying from cardiovascular disease as people who had exercised for their entire lives.
"I'm not saying don't have fun, but when you're young, you've got to take that time to do walking, jogging, running, hiking, bowling — whatever you want, but you have to just get out there and become engaged in thinking about your longevity," Hanna said.
Experts agree: Nathan K. LeBrasseur, a physiologist at the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging at Mayo Clinic, previously told BI that although aerobic and resistance exercises are especially good for longevity, the best type of exercise you can do is one you enjoy enough to do consistently.
"I feel a sense of accomplishment. I have a sense of purpose and destiny when I get up in the morning," Hanna added.
Hanna won gold in the four by 100 metres with her relay team at this year's National Senior Games.
Madonna Hanna
Take baby steps
You can't just get up off the couch and run a marathon, Hanna said: You have to "take baby steps," "be patient with yourself," and "listen to your body to find a level you're comfortable with."
She also recommended asking experts such as doctors or trainer for advice on how to start out and avoid injury.
"I am still learning to be a sprinter. Yes, I have had success, but I am still learning so don't compare yourself to other people," she said.
Bryan Goldberg, a personal trainer, previously told BI that it's best to start out "slow and steady" when beginning to exercise, because it's more sustainable in the longer term.
Eat plenty to fuel your body
Hanna said she eats more when she's exercising. Hanna used to run out of energy during training, but has changed her diet "drastically" to better fuel her body.
She eats a lot of fruit and vegetables, such as leafy greens and blueberries, as well as sources of lean protein like salmon and cottage cheese.
While the ideal diet is different for everyone, Mike Molloy, a nutrition coach, previously told BI that people who do high-intensity exercise need to ensure they are eating enough to fuel their bodies and avoid muscle loss.
