Day: August 19, 2025

• Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall says she often receives negative comments about her gaining weight.
• “I have a daily battle with myself not to go on Ozempic,” Thirlwall said.
• She said she has a history of eating disorders and doesn’t know “where taking something like that would end for me.”

Little Mix‘s Jade Thirlwall says she is resisting Ozempic despite the public scrutiny around her body.

In an interview with The Guardian published Saturday, the singer said that many of the negative comments she receives are about weight gain.

“I have a daily battle with myself not to go on Ozempic,” Thirlwall told The Guardian. “I don’t judge people that do, but because I have a history of eating disorders, I don’t know where taking something like that would end for me.”

Thirlwall said she had only been out of the hospital for a few months after treatment for anorexia when she auditioned for “The X Factor” in 2011 at 18.

“Historically, if I’ve ever felt that something is out of my control, then restricting food has been a means of controlling my life in a very toxic way,” she said.

Little Mix was formed on “The X Factor” in 2011, comprising Thirlwall, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Perrie Edwards, and Jesy Nelson. Nelson left the group in 2020 amid backlash over Blackfishing, and in 2022, the band went on hiatus to focus on their solo careers.

Thirlwall said that much of the scrutiny around her body comes from people comparing her to her younger self.

“Now I’m in my 30s and the healthiest I’ve ever been, but every time I post a picture, there are comments saying, ‘She must be pregnant.’ The sad thing is that it’s usually women,” Thirlwall said.

“But people are used to seeing me in a group environment five or 10 years ago when I was stick-thin because I was in my early 20s with an eating disorder,” she said.

A representative for Thirlwall did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

Ozempic and Wegovy are brand names for semaglutide, an injectable drug originally developed for diabetes. In 2021, the FDA approved semaglutide for use in weight management. The drug works by regulating hunger signals, allowing people to feel full while eating less.

However, it has side effects such as nausea, diarrhea, and constipation. Some patients also reported feeling disgusted by the foods they used to enjoy.

Dr. Francesco Rubino, the chair of metabolic and bariatric surgery at King’s College London, told Business Insider in 2022 that it was common for people to regain the weight after stopping treatment.

Several doctors also told Business Insider in July that they’ve seen a sharp increase in patients on GLP-1 medications when they enter treatment for eating disorders.

In recent years, many Hollywood celebrities have addressed speculation about whether they’ve used weight-loss drugs.

In May 2023, NBA star Charles Barkley said he lost over 60 pounds in six months after taking Mounjaro while eating healthily and exercising. Later that year, in December 2023, Oprah Winfrey said she uses weight-loss medication to help manage her weight.

Meanwhile, stars such as Lizzo, Kelly Clarkson, and Jesse Plemons, have denied using such medications, attributing their weight loss instead to lifestyle changes.

• Don’t replace your junior employees with AI, said Amazon cloud chief.
• “They’re the most leaned into your AI tools,” said Matt Garman.
• The CEO of Amazon Web Services also said cutting junior staff for AI could wreck future talent pipelines.

Matt Garman, Amazon’s cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don’t ditch your junior employees.

The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the “Matthew Berman” podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is the “dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“They’re probably the least expensive employees you have. They’re the most leaned into your AI tools,” he said.

“How’s that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?”

Garman said companies should keep hiring graduates and teaching them how to build software, break down problems, and adopt best practices.

He also said the most valuable skills in an AI-driven economy aren’t tied to any one college degree.

“If you spend all of your time learning one specific thing and you’re like, ‘That’s the thing I’m going to be expert at for the next 30 years,’ I can promise you that’s not going to be valuable 30 years from now,” he said.

Instead, he said students should focus on developing critical reasoning, creativity, and the ability to adapt as technology evolves.

Garman and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

AI is coming for junior employees

Tech leaders have been vocal about how AI could replace the work of entry-level staff.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in June that AI is already beginning to act like junior-level coworkers.

“You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees,” Altman said of AI agents during the Snowflake Summit 2025.

Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, said earlier this year that AI will soon be able to replicate the skills of a junior software engineer, adding that it could happen within the next year.

The pressure is also showing up in data. According to Goldman Sachs, the unemployment rate for 20- to 30-year-olds in tech has risen by nearly 3 percentage points since early 2024, over four times the increase in the overall jobless rate.

“While this is still a small share of the overall US labor market, we estimate that generative AI will eventually displace 6-7% of all US workers,” Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist, wrote in August.

Others don’t agree that junior staff are expendable.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said last month that young engineers frequently bring fresh perspectives and are more likely to have been early adopters of AI.

“Folks that go to high school now, or to college, or even kids earlier in their education, they get to use AI much faster,” Dohmke said in a July episode of “The Pragmatic Engineer.”

“They get it because they are taking this with an open mind. They don’t have the, ‘This is how we’ve always done it,'” he added.

• OpenAI released two open-weight models earlier this month.
• This was the first time OpenAI released an open-weight model since GPT-2 in 2019.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the decision was driven by China’s open-source models.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said China’s open-source models drove the company to release its open-weight models earlier this month.

“It was clear that if we didn’t do it, the world was gonna be mostly built on Chinese open-source models,” Altman said during a media briefing CNBC reported on Monday.

“That was a factor in our decision, for sure. Wasn’t the only one, but that loomed large,” he added.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

OpenAI released two open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, on August 5. The former is designed for high-end computers, while the latter is meant to be run on “most desktops and laptops.”

The launch marked the first time OpenAI published an open-weight model since the release of GPT-2 in 2019. Unlike “closed” models, users can run and fine-tune an “open-weight” model locally. GPT-3, GPT-4, and the brand new GPT-5 are all closed models.

Altman said in an X post on August 5 that OpenAI believes gpt-oss to be the “best and most usable open model in the world.”

The OpenAI CEO said that releasing the models aligned with OpenAI’s mission “to ensure AGI that benefits all of humanity.” AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a theoretical form of AI that can think and reason like humans.

“To that end, we are excited for the world to be building on an open AI stack created in the United States, based on democratic values, available for free to all and for wide benefit,” he wrote in his X post.

To be sure, OpenAI isn’t the only American tech company that has made its models open. Social media giant Meta’s Llama models are also open-weight, though its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in an essay last month that Meta will need to be “careful about what we choose to open source.”

In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek stunned the world with its high-performing but relatively cheaper R1 model. R1 is an open-source and open-weight model. President Donald Trump told GOP lawmakers then that he saw DeepSeek’s success as a “positive” and a “wake-up call” for American tech companies.

During a Reddit AMA in January, Altman said that OpenAI would follow DeepSeek’s lead and release its model weights as well.

“I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy,” he said.