• Scott Scovel moved to Miami in his 50s, hoping to benefit from lower taxes and cheaper living costs.
• But those costs didn't make as much of a difference as he anticipated, especially after he retired.
• The biggest benefit of Miami was unexpected — he bought a much cheaper home and retired early.

In 2021, at age 58, I followed one of the hottest relocation trends in the US: I moved from New York to Florida.

I'd accepted a new job in Miami that I intended to be my last, and wanted to see what it would be like to retire in Florida. I was drawn by Miami's warm winters, lower taxes, and supposedly cheaper living, but I also loved New York, so I was torn about where I'd have a better retirement.

Now that I'm here, I love Miami's glorious weather and cultural diversity, but I've only found modest benefits from Florida's lower taxes and living costs when compared to my life in New York.

Miami hasn't met all my expectations, but it surprised me in one very important way, and I'm glad I moved here.

Housing costs were dramatically cheaper in Miami, but they're on the rise

During my first few weeks in Miami, I was lured in by the bike rides I could take through lush parks and along glistening blue waters. In the neighborhood of Brickell, I could enjoy a pedestrian lifestyle similar to Manhattan's. By my sixth month, I was ready to commit to living here permanently, so I called a realtor.

I bought a two-bedroom condo in cash for $727,500, using the money from the $1.65 million sale of my two-bedroom Manhattan condo in 2019. With no mortgage, my monthly expenses fell significantly. I suddenly realized I could afford to retire years earlier than I expected, relying on my savings, so I left full-time work in 2022 at age 60.

I was lucky because I took Manhattan money with me to Miami, after nearly 40 years of working in the financial services industry. For other Americans moving from lower-income areas, the "Miami dream" may not be as affordable. House prices in Florida aren't what they used to be: evidence shows Miami condos cost over twice as much as they did 10 years ago.

Lower taxes and living costs didn't make as much difference as I expected

When I received my first paycheck in Florida, I rejoiced because there's no personal state income tax here. New York State and City taxes cost me nearly $40,000 some years.

Now that I no longer have an income from a job, I'm not benefiting in the same way. Lower taxes initially drew me to Miami, but I hadn't properly considered that this factor would lose significance when my income fell in retirement.

I also assumed everything would be more expensive in NYC than Miami, but I've been struck by how comparable many costs are. I still buy clothes from online retailers and household goods from Amazon, meaning the prices don't fluctuate significantly based on where I am.

My weekly grocery bill is perhaps a little cheaper in Miami, but some things were unexpectedly cheaper in New York, most notably transportation, as the subway system beats having to own a car or pay for Ubers to get around parts of Miami.

Miami has great weather, but it can't beat New York's cultural abundance

I absolutely love the Florida weather. I grew up with four-month winters in Minnesota, and during my first year in Miami, I'd brag to friends up north that I now wear shorts 360 out of 365 days. I worried that the summer heat would get oppressive, but it actually hasn't been that bad. I wake up at dawn to exercise, avoid the midday sun, and reappear outdoors in the cooler evenings.

I like that Miami has a diverse population and is a major hub for Latin American and Caribbean cultures. However, I sometimes miss the broader global culture in New York, where I could effortlessly eat great Thai food just blocks from home, take in an African art exhibit at the Met, or attend a European film festival. Miami can be proud of its restaurant and cultural scene, but almost no city can compare to New York's abundance.

I was shocked housing in Miami was so much cheaper than New York

Though I came to Miami expecting to make significant tax savings and benefit from lower day-to-day expenses, I've found that my retirement living costs are pretty similar to what they would've been in New York.

The biggest benefit, however, was unexpected. I was shocked to learn that Miami housing could be so much cheaper than New York. I bought a comparable condo for less than half the cost of my Manhattan home, which eliminated my need for a mortgage and enabled me to retire early. For that, I'm extremely grateful to Miami.

Retiring early means I'm young enough to fully enjoy my golden years. I bask in the Miami sunshine on walks and bike rides, travel extensively to other countries, and have time to pursue all sorts of hobbies, from improv classes to museum trips.

One of the most enduring myths about Florida's history is that European explorer Ponce de León came here in search of the fountain of youth in the 1500s. I'd like to think I've found my own fountain of youth by retiring early in Miami — something that means more to me than a lower tax rate.

Do you have a story to share about moving to Miami? Contact the editor, Charissa Cheong, at ccheong@businessinsider.com

• Srdjan Stakic vibe-coded a security camera system for his parents to ensure their safety.
• Stakic used vibe-coding platform Lovable to get started, as well as popular AI chatbots.
• His vibe-coded software became the basis for his AI-assisted startup Alvis.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Srdjan Stakic, 49, a former film producer who vibe-coded an AI system to monitor his elderly parents and detect falls. He's now launching a company that aims to offer the technology to others. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was diagnosed with stage four cancer two years ago, AI became essential.

Everything was happening so quickly: The doctors would talk to me for 15 minutes and leave me with more questions than answers. AI gave me an objective way to document and make sense of what was happening.

I'm now in remission. As my health improved, my parents' health declined, and I began helping them with cooking, cleaning, and medical appointments.

English was not their first language, and communicating with healthcare providers was tough. I recorded our conversations with their doctors and compared them to the after-visit summary using AI. I would put together all this information and translate it into Serbian for them.

But I soon wanted more than what the chatbots could offer. I wanted a system that could observe what was happening with my parents, or any other patient, and assess it through the lens of safety and dignity. I would think of how much guilt I'd feel if something happened and I wasn't there. What kind of son would I be?

I had never coded before, and I didn't have millions for an initial investment

I don't have a background in coding. I have a doctorate in health education and a master's in film production, and I have produced some films of my own.

I started outlining my idea with Gemini and ChatGPT to examine it from a tech and ethical standpoint. I built this document of what I wanted to achieve. I kept asking my family how they wanted to be treated in each scenario — like a fall or medical emergency — and I wanted to make the system flexible.

Then I transferred to Lovable. Lovable gave me a live development environment where I could describe what I wanted, see it built in real time, test it, and iterate. It connected the pieces, the frontend, the backend, the database, the authentication, the integrations, things I did not even know I needed until they were there. The chatbots helped me plan. Lovable helped me build.

I uploaded hundreds of training videos for nurses and healthcare providers to train the AI. I created a high-fidelity validation pipeline and a labeled dataset. I labeled real-world caregiving footage with established clinical benchmarks, like Stanford's C-I-CARE framework. When you approach a patient and introduce yourself, you tell them why they're there, you ask the patient's name and pronouns, and you introduce what you're about to do. You explain next steps and see if they have any questions or concerns.

I also started building an AI equipped with cameras to identify falls. I would fall in the middle of my living room and see whether the system recognized that and how long it would take.

It took me a few months to make it work

I tried different cameras and protocols, but ultimately, I had to hire an IT company to help me connect multiple cameras. The system can now identify a fall and send notifications to loved ones or EMS, and provide their location with a brief summary of their health records. The system also analyzes interactions between caregivers and my parents. It's sophisticated enough to analyze in real time — based on audio and video — if a caregiver is being rude or unprofessional. My parents have felt safer since I built this. I also built a feature that scans their environment for any trip hazards, such as cables.

I don't want to spy on my family, so I don't actively review all the video footage. When a concern is flagged, the system clips approximately 30 seconds around that moment and notifies mewith a summary of what it observed and why. It can also generate an advocacy letter from that same analysis: what was said, what was done, and how the interaction compares to the C-I-CARE framework to evaluate caregiver conduct.

I launched a company to offer this tech to others

This all started as an idea for my family, but the more I talk about it, the more people tell me they wish they had this for their parents. So I decided to launch a startup, called Alvis, to make this system available to others.

It detects falls in real time, recognizes when a caregiver goes above and beyond, and generates advocacy letters when something goes wrong. It's in private beta and accepting waitlist applications for our pilot cohort, launching April 13. The model will be a monthly subscription, similar to what families already pay for camera cloud storage, with a premium tier for AI-assisted analytics.

This week, my mom was hospitalized, and I used AI in four ways

First, I used it as a real-time medical interpreter: Every lab result went straight into Claude, so I understood what was happening immediately, not the next morning when a doctor was free.

AI was also my clinical advocate. When a history and physical exam understated her cancer history, Claude caught it. When her glucose started climbing from steroids, Claude flagged it.

Third, I used AI to translate updates into patient-friendly language in both English and Serbian.

Finally, Alvis — the camera system I designed — was running live in her hospital room all night, with her permission and a nod from her care team. It picked up her saying in Serbian, quietly, that she had endured too much. It flagged when I visited, and we recorded ourselves together.

It's amazing to see how vibe coding is democratizing access to AI tools. You can build a company that helps a very niche group that needs a specific thing. I still don't fully understand code or the extent of what I built, but it seems to be working.

• Tejal Rives hoped adopting AI at work would help keep her safe from tech layoffs.
• However, she lost her job at Amazon during layoffs in October 2025.
• Rives was disheartened but was glad the experience taught her about AI.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tejal Rives, 35, who lives in Arizona. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In October 2025, I read a news article that Amazon was planning to cut jobs. I'd survived other layoffs, but this time my gut told me I'd be affected. Sure enough, not long after, I received an email that my position as a product marketer was being eliminated.

I was one of 14,000 people impacted, and even though I understood the decision wasn't personal, it was very disheartening. I thought up-skilling in AI would make me safer from layoffs, but even though it didn't, I still think professionals should focus on learning this one important AI skill: prompt engineering.

I thought working on AI could safeguard my job

At the time of the October layoffs, there was debate around whether AI was the reason.

The company was encouraging us to use AI at the time, but I don't think it took my job. I wrote descriptions for internal products at Amazon, and when I used AI to help, I'd need to ask it to rewrite its output without fluff words. It didn't sound like how people talk. Despite my ethical qualms, I used AI, but, in my opinion, it was nowhere close to replacing my role.

Before I was laid off, I helped build an internal site for Amazon using AI. I hadn't really coded before, but with a colleague's help, I learned how to vibe code with a lot of trial and error.

I thought using AI for this project and showcasing different skills would make me more valuable to the company, but in the end, it didn't keep me from being laid off.

Initially, I felt like I'd wasted time by learning something I likely wouldn't use again, but overall, I don't think my efforts were wasted. The most important thing the experience taught me was prompt engineering, the practice of asking AI the right questions. I want to be minimal with my use of AI for ethical reasons, including around the water resources needed to power data centers. Efficient prompt engineering helps me ask AI my question once, without needing to clarify three or more times.

I'd highly recommend that other professionals learn prompt engineering to up-skill themselves in the age of AI.

The workforce has shifted, and you're likely going to need to learn AI and use it at your job, regardless of your moral qualms. We need to up-skill to survive.

I have my own business, and use AI very rarely

My husband and I already agreed that if I were laid off, I'd focus on being the primary parent to our child as well as on my career coaching business, called Do My Resume LLC, which I was running on the side of my Amazon job. Before being laid off, I planned to eventually quit my job and focus on it full-time.

I didn't realize how burnt out I was after four years at Amazon, though, and it took me a while to pivot into working on my business. For roughly three weeks, I didn't touch my computer. I took up sewing and house-cleaning projects because I needed separation from my screen.

Now, my life is slower than it was at Amazon. I spend roughly four hours a day, six days a week, on the business, and spend the rest of my time taking care of the house and my family.

The business provides career coaching and résumé-writing services, but we don't use AI to write résumés, because it's humans who read them. Recently, I used AI to give me advice about starting a YouTube series for my business, so I will use this technology to help me flesh out ideas, but very rarely. I haven't vibe-coded since the project at Amazon.

My husband is the breadwinner, and we can survive on his income, but the business is bringing in some fun money for me.

I think people should prepare for layoffs in the age of AI

Being laid off helped me remember that, at the end of the day, your job and company shouldn't be your entire life. It shouldn't come before your well-being.

I wish I hadn't sacrificed time with my child to get projects done towards the end of my time at Amazon. I'm glad I'm no longer sacrificing that time.

I think there will be more layoffs that will be attributed to AI's efficiency, and professionals should always be prepared. Reskilling in the age of AI won't necessarily stop a company from laying you off, but it might help you land a role faster.

Amazon did not provide a statement in response to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Do you have a story to share about being laid off in 2026? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com

• Sam Altman said AI would in the future be sold like electricity and water, metered by usage.
• "We see a future where intelligence is a utility," the OpenAI CEO said.
• Altman suggested demand is surging and compute will decide who gets access.

In the future, you could have another utility bill to pay for: artificial intelligence.

That's according to Sam Altman, who says AI will eventually be bought and sold as a basic utility like electricity and water that's metered by usage.

Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, the OpenAI CEO said tech companies like his are building toward a future where intelligence is delivered on demand.

"Fundamentally our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," Altman said, referring to the units AI systems use to process and price input and output data.

"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for," he added.

In that world, compute capacity determines who gets access — and demand for AI is only going up, Altman said. Compute capacity is the processing power required to train and run AI models, determined by infrastructure such as chips and data centers.

If OpenAI doesn't build enough compute capacity to meet demand, Altman said, it either "can't sell it or the price gets really high." That would push AI access toward the wealthy, or force governments to decide how limited compute should be distributed, he said.

The infrastructure sprint

Major tech companies are set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on compute to meet soaring demand for AI.

In her keynote at CES 2026 in January, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the world will need more than "10 yottaflops" of compute — a scale 10,000 times larger than global AI capacity in 2022 — over the next five years to keep up with growth.

Powering that expansion is a significant infrastructure challenge.

AI data centers can consume as much electricity as small cities, and the strain on the US power grid — along with transformer shortages and slow permitting for transmission lines — could become a bottleneck.

In an episode of the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast in January, Elon Musk said that electricity generation is now the limiting factor in scaling AI, predicting China could outpace the US in total AI compute because of its faster energy build-out.

Inside tech companies, compute is a valuable but sometimes scarce resource. Engineers are competing for access to GPUs, and some job candidates now ask about their AI compute budget alongside salary and equity.

Last December, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company, which has committed roughly $1.4 trillion on data center projects over the next eight years, wants "to be ahead of the curve," but said, "I don't think we will be, no matter how ambitious we can dream of being right now."

At the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, Altman said the goal is to move away from a world of being "capacity constrained."