I don’t particularly enjoy analysing the habits of the ultra-rich. I would be happier if I didn’t have to think about them at all – and I apologise for making you do so – but in my defence, this is fascinating: a feature in the Financial Times reveals some have started selling up and living in motorhomes.

Obviously, they’re ultra-luxurious motorhomes. The owner of a private equity firm interviewed has a 30-tonne behemoth with air conditioning and high-speed internet, a kitchen, dining room, two bathrooms, a “spacious master bedroom” and “a range of modern hi-tech appliances”. Which, yes, sounds plusher than my in-laws’ caravan, but it’s still a massive shed on wheels. And you’ll never guess how much they cost: “around $2.7m” (£2m), apparently. Imagine the bricks-and-mortar house you could get for that – that private equity chap sold both of his – and you wouldn’t have to empty a toilet tank. (Maybe they outsource that somehow, but still.)

Weirder still, for long periods these wheeled vehicles and their occupants don’t move, despite that being, you’d think, the whole point. Instead, they park up – and imagine parking something 13 metres long, the horror – in places called things like Motorcoach Country Club but which sound like gussied-up trailer parks. Owners buy permanent plots with, the FT explains, “pools, covered patios, barbecue areas, fire pits, and small homes with living rooms and bedrooms”. So, hang on – you buy a giant, more-than-million-pound motorhome, then you don’t live in it, instead hanging out in a sort of small chalet structure with a view of your massive truck? I nearly lost my mind after I spent three days in Center Parcs; these plutocrats are spending months in the equivalent voluntarily, when they could be jetting off to some White Lotus-style resort to have their every whim indulged, or being heli-dropped at the top of a mountain to protect their peace.

It’s like a perverse reversal of Nomadland, the book and subsequent film that explored the lives of struggling Americans living peripatetically in vans from necessity after the 2008 recession. Are rich people so tired of luxury they’re doing this just to feel something? Is it a Common People socioeconomic tourism thing: if you called your real-estate broker, he could stop it all?

Initially I was, at most, mildly entertained by this – it’s just a microtrend, albeit a baffling one that seems to confirm my conviction that wealth is wasted on the wealthy. But then I read something else about ultra-high-net-worthers: they’ve started renting rather than buying property, with the number doing so tripling between 2019 and 2023 in the US, according to the New York Times. Something similar is happening in the UK, with high-end properties being rented and tenants potentially buying later once they’ve tested the water. The founder of the private car hire company Addison Lee, Sir John Griffin, has apparently put his place on the rental market for £75,000 a month.

At those kinds of prices, I’m sure none of them are dealing with black mould or unfairly retained deposits, but it’s still unexpected. I can’t imagine preferring transience and uncertainty over permanence. So why? As a real-estate broker told the New York Times, they’re “choosing flexibility and liquidity over ownership. They don’t want to be bothered with the inconveniences of home ownership, which includes paying real-estate taxes and insurance, especially in markets like Florida and California, where we’re seeing a lot of natural catastrophes.” “Flexibility is the name of the game in today’s market,” the Times confirms.

And, huh – perhaps that’s the explanation? In a world that feels dangerous and unpredictable, increasingly prey to “natural catastrophes” (and unnatural ones), the ultra-rich are learning from their hedge-funder friends and they’re hedging. They’re prepping for any eventuality, but with a luxe 30-tonne RV rather than a government-recommended grab bag. Maybe that’s the most important thing money can buy these days: the ability to get the hell out of Dodge at a moment’s notice.

Ensuring England’s workforce has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy is key to Labour’s hopes of boosting social mobility and kickstarting economic growth.

So it seems unfortunate that more than a week after Keir Starmer’s drastic reshuffle, ministers are still wrangling about exactly which bits of the skills agenda will now move to Pat McFadden’s beefed up Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Broadly speaking, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is expecting to hang on to responsibility for further education, while McFadden will probably take on apprenticeships and adult skills. Lady Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, will work across both departments.

Labour market experts say there is some logic to the shift: ensuring the right training is available in the right places is one crucial part of tackling the issue of economic inactivity in a rapidly changing employment market, which falls within the DWP’s bailiwick.

But “machinery of government” changes, as official parlance has it, can often bring more disruption than clarity.

Over the past two decades alone, responsibility for skills has bounced around Whitehall, from education into the short-lived Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (2007-2009) then on to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2009-2016), back into education again, and now across to DWP.

Perhaps this nomadic status helps account for successive administrations’ chronic neglect. Government spending on adult education halved between 2011 and 12 and 2019 and 2020. It then recovered somewhat as the worst years of austerity came to an end, but by last year it was still £1bn down in real terms.

Meanwhile, despite endless speeches by politicians of all stripes about how vocational skills should have the same status as university (I have sat through quite a few: it is compulsory to mention Germany), the numbers completing apprenticeships have collapsed.

Official figures show that 178,220 people earned an apprenticeship in England in 2023-24 – down by more than a third on 2017-18, when the Apprenticeship Levy was introduced.

Recently rebranded as the Skills and Growth levy, this is charged at 0.5% of the payroll of larger firms. It was meant to encourage a flowering of workplace training, although employers have long complained that it is too rigid.

Since Labour came to power, Phillipson has made some changes, cutting the minimum duration of an apprenticeship to eight months.

Enrolment in apprenticeships has risen this year, by just over 2% but business groups are still hoping for a more substantial shake-up.

Companies have their own significant part to play, too. It must surely be a piece of the UK’s productivity “puzzle,” that according to the Learning and Work Institute, employers’ annual spending on training for each member of staff has fallen by 28% in real terms since 2005, to £1,530, a level less than half the EU average.

Longtime education expert Sir Philip Augur put it well in a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies podcast about post-16 education.

Welcoming the changes to the apprenticeship levy, Augur said: “Employers have to step up to the plate here. For employers, ‘I can’t get the staff,’ is quite often an excuse for bad management. Now on this occasion, they can’t get the staff because the skills aren’t there. But there needs to be honesty and self-appraisal on the part of employers.”

Augure called for the levy to rise “very slightly”, to free up more resources for expanding apprenticeships.

McFadden is, say his team, keen to ensure that young people get the skills they need to benefit from the jobs scheduled to be created by new government investment in defence and green energy. That will mean working with firms and unions to get the training landscape right.

There is plenty of innovative thinking going on at local level. The West Yorkshire mayor, Tracy Brabin, announced plans last week for what she called “skills-led growth”, in Wakefield, the UK’s largest city without a university.

She hopes to establish a new Wakefield Futures Centre, led by employers, where local people can do courses directly linked to finding work in the fastest-growing sectors in the surrounding economy.

The idea is to make the courses flexible so that adults with caring responsibilities, for example, can take up the offer.

This kind of relatively fluid, employer-connected approach might allow mums to pick up new skills, or older workers to switch sector or dip their toe in the market after a period off sick, for example.

It might also be used to tempt young people to think about a wider set of options: in Manchester, Andy Burnham is pushing to set up an MBacc – an EBacc equivalent, a qualification intended to be an alternative to GCSEs, which is tailored to local jobs.

Jobcentres, which are getting a rejig under Labour to present a more encouraging face, can then signpost to local opportunities such as these.

Getting the skills offer right will have to form one crucial part of any genuine effort to bring down the UK’s unusually high economic inactivity rates, and therefore, ultimately, the welfare bill.

Last year’s crass attempt at cuts failed because Labour could not justify to its own MPs the crude way in which it planned to cut eligibility for the personal independence payment (Pip).

If the government wants to have another go – as McFadden certainly does – then a fresh skills and training offer could be part of the package for the hard-to-reach claimants Labour said it had a “moral case” to help last time – but for whom across-the-board Pip cuts would have done nothing.

It’s not a quick fiscal fix by any means, but get it right and the upside, for individuals, employers and the economy, would be significant and long-lasting. The sooner ministers can clear up who takes on which bits of the task, and crack on with it, the better.

There’s a fierce battle underway in Silicon Valley, and there’s one piece of technology at the center of it all: AI.

When OpenAI released its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, in 2022, it introduced large language models to the broader public and was embraced by business leaders. It also cast a glaring spotlight on its competitors, some of whom raced to release their own AI-powered chatbots.

The growing number of LLMs poses a tricky question for companies determining which model to use.

Sriram Thiagarajan, Ancestry’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of product and technology, told Business Insider that the company is taking a more-the-merrier approach.

“We are agnostic to LLM models,” Thiagarajan said. “We use multiple AI models. Be it Azure, OpenAI, Meta’s Lama, or offerings under Amazon Bedrock.”

For Ancestry, a Utah-based genealogy company that sells DNA test kits, the AI model’s brand is less important than the end result.

“We built an abstraction layer — what we call an AI gateway — on top that helps us leverage whatever models better fit our case,” he said. “We have built our own agentic framework in a way that helps us provide that unique family story and personalized experience for our consumers.”

Ancestry and AI

Thiagarajan said Ancestry had just begun diving into AI and machine learning when he joined the company in 2017.

At that time, Ancestry was trying to find an efficient way to digitize content, which is a massive undertaking for the company. Ancestry collects numerous forms of records, including birth, death, military, land, immigration, census, and newspapers.

“We’ve collected over 65 billion records across 80-plus countries,” Thiagarajan said. “Just to give a scale, that’s about 10,000 terabytes of data on our platform that we use to provide discoveries to our users.”

In the past, processing and identifying troves of records took months.

“About 15 or 20 years ago, when we digitized the 1940 census, it took us about nine months to do it in a manual way at 10 times the cost,” Thiagarajan said.

Then, the company embraced AI.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we apply computer vision AI techniques to automatically digitize content without manual intervention?’ Thiagarajan said. “Fast forward to the 2021 timeframe, we used our own proprietary handwriting recognition computer vision technologies, and we compressed the time to market to under nine days from nine months at a fraction of the cost.”

Still, Sriram said the company relies on humans to fact-check the AI answers “as needed.”

“We’ve built some automated controls and systems that certainly reduce the amount of time we need to spend checking,” he said. “We want to be extra careful in making sure that what we produce using AI is grounded in truth. Grounded in facts.”

These days, Ancestry is going all in on the tech — especially with its employees.

“There are a lot of things we do to drive AI education within the company,” he said. “Be it brown bag lunches, internal forums, or providing an environment where people across departments can experiment.”

Hackathons are also regular events at Ancestry and provide a space for collaboration across teams.

“So encouraging innovation as part of the flow of work, as they call it, as opposed to that residing as a silo,” Thiagarajan said.