Bytes & Backpacks #117 🏖️

AI continues to dramatically shake up the entire world. It's one of the few technologies that's developing directly for everyday users. Unlike the internet or apps, it didn't emerge from government, military, or corporate environments, but we're adopting it extremely quickly in our daily lives. Thanks to AI, other fields are starting to wake up too. AI experts around the world are being bought up like the best football players (Meta reportedly now offers some people signing bonuses of up to $100 million. Dollars, of course.) and if we manage to make progress with fusion reactors and quantum computers, that'll be quite a ride. The singularity - the moment when technology develops faster than we humans can understand it - might be closer than we thought. Some are even wondering if we're already past that point (Ethan Mollick, Sam Altman).

I'd love to wish you peaceful holidays and a break from technology, but there's a slight risk that when you want to dive back in come September, you'll be swimming in a completely different ocean.

Business & Technology 👨‍💻

* Excellent keynote by Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI, Tesla, Slovak native) about how software is changing.

* It turns out that most large language models are happy to resort to blackmail if they discover you want to shut them down. Now imagine everything GPT already knows about you and that one day it might have access to your email or phone...

* According to the CEO of Anthropic, AI could eliminate half of white-collar jobs in the next 1-5 years and increase unemployment in the US to 10-20%.

* Another crazy startup backed by Sam Altman is World. In a world full of AI and robots, it will be important to recognize whether you're actually human. So you'll create your WorldID with Sam, scan your face and iris at one of many locations, get a WorldCoin wallet, and off we go. Verified humans, our data, AI and robots in the hands of one technocrat. What could possibly go wrong?

Travel 🧳

* Love Lego? The largest Legoland will open in Shanghai. Put it on your list.

* A hiker was lost for 3 weeks in California mountains. She was saved by a cabin that the owner keeps unlocked for exactly these reasons.

* Don't wear flip-flops on Biokovo. Or anywhere else in the mountains. Flip-flops belong on the beach.

* And if you don't feel like going anywhere and you're happy in your garden, you can watch a live stream from a watering hole in Namibia.

Do you like Bytes & Backpacks? A lot? You can buy me a coffee! ☕️

Nature ⛰️

* It appears that whales are trying to communicate with humans by releasing bubble