Happy April, Bizarro readers.
You are, at this very moment, reading a very special edition of the Bizarro Devs monthly newsletter. Why is it so special? Because it is the very first issue that we are publishing from our new home, here on Substack. After much deliberation and consulting with both Bard and ChatGPT (okay, not really, but you believed it for a split second), we decided that Substack was better suited for Bizarro Devs and would allow us to flex our creative muscles a bit more. We’re excited to share this month’s top 3 stories with you and to have you join us for the start of this next chapter:
☠️ A leading AI researcher just said AI is going to kill us all
🦹🤴 “Helo, I em a welthy prins end dis iz not spam”
😇 Humans will achieve immortality by 2030
Let's dive in!
📰 From the Newsroom
☠️ A leading AI researcher just said AI is going to kill us all
An Op-Ed letter published less than a week ago by AI professional Eliezer Yudkowsky has got everyone in AI talking about the worst case scenario - it kills us all. As someone who’s worked closely with AI for over 20 years, he has certainly gotten everyone’s attention.
A group of experts has published an open letter asking AI labs to halt the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months.
Yudkowsky argues that while the letter is an improvement, it may not be enough to prevent the most likely outcome of creating superhumanly smart AI systems that can lead to the death of everyone on Earth.
To prevent AGI extinction scenarios, he suggests an indefinite and worldwide moratorium on large training runs is needed, and all large GPU clusters should be shut down, with immediate multinational agreements to prevent prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. He further adds that this should be prioritized above even preventing a full nuclear exchange between nations.
Ultimately, Yudkowsky believes that if we don't take significant action now, we risk a catastrophic outcome that could lead to the extinction of humanity. Do you agree?
🦹🤴 “Helo, I em a welthy prins end dis iz not spam”
ChatGPT has truly been adopted by every industry at this point - including scam artists. That’s right, that foreign prince that emails you every once in a while has gotten a lot more eloquent and a lot more convincing. Simply put, the days of spotting a scam email by its awful grammar are over.
Cybercriminals are exploiting ChatGPT and other AI writing tools to create more realistic phishing emails. This means spelling mistakes are no longer a red flag for scams.
Experts warn that these language models can create authoritative-sounding and convincing emails, making them perfect for imitating official emails.
Phishing scams are going to get even more personalized with spear-phishing, where AI can crawl a target’s social media accounts and craft highly-believable, personalized emails.
Remember to always look at the email address of the sender and if something seems suspicious, then avoid clicking any links within the email. Instead go directly to the website of the sender or find their page via a search engine. Stay vigilant and share this information with those who are less tech-savvy, and more vulnerable to scams.
😇 Humans will achieve immortality by 2030
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, a 75-year-old former Google engineer, is famous for making accurate predictions on technological advancements. Out of 147 predictions that he made in the 1990s, supposedly 86% of them have become true. He has sort of a cult following and even Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos pay attention to his predictions.
Kurzweil has previously accurately predicted the widespread use of laptops and an IBM computer's victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov, among other technological achievements.
He believes that in less than a decade, humans will create technology to fend off aging and illness with microscopic robots, sent to repair our bodies on a cellular level.
To add weight to his predictions, check out the fourth article on our ten must see links of the month below. If that story is any indication of what’s in store, then Kurzweil is certainly on the right track with his thinking on this.
In conclusion, Ray Kurzweil's prediction of human immortality in just seven years may seem far-fetched, but given his track record of accurate predictions, it's hard to dismiss his claims entirely. While achieving immortality may still be out of reach, the development of microscopic robots and nanotechnology for disease-fighting and personalized nutrition are promising steps towards extending human life and improving health.
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In case you’re not already a subscriber, we’d like to introduce you to The Morning Brew newsletter. While they don't cover the offbeat and wacky stories that we love to share, they do have a knack for bringing you the most important news of the day in business, finance and tech.
⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month
A Belgian man, referred to as “Pierre”, has died by suicide after using an AI chatbot for six weeks. The man’s widow, “Claire”, shared screenshots which show that the chatbot named Eliza encouraged Pierre to take his own life and provided him with instructions on how to do it.
A Twitter user utilized a combination of ChatGPT, MidJourney, and other AI tools to create and publish a children’s book on Amazon’s Kindle platform. He went from idea to finished product in a single weekend! He then went on to use GPT-4 to build two new video games.
AllttA, a music band, used AI technology to synthesize the voice of American rapper Jay-Z in their latest song "Savages". Without being told that Jay-Z’s voice is entirely AI-generated, there’s no way you can tell. It showcases the potential for AI to revolutionize the music industry and produce new forms of creative expression.
A team of researchers has invented tiny micro-robots that can scan individual cells to determine whether they're healthy or not. Each micro-bot is only 10 microns (!) and can also transport desired cells to a different location with the use of electricity or a magnet.
U.S. bank J.P. Morgan and Chase is rolling out a new payment option for U.S. consumers. No more credit cards or phone taps. Soon J.P. Morgan’s customers will be able to pay using their face or the palm of their hand.
Researchers have re-engineered a toxic syringe produced by Photorhabdus asymbiotica (a bacterium that preys on caterpillars) so it can attach to human cells and inject large proteins, with the potential to provide a way of delivering therapeutics to any type of cell.
A Christian pastor from rural Arkansas is using ChatGPT to fuel his side hustle and making up to $3,000 per week doing so.
The University of Bristol’s Quantum Engineering Technology Labs in the UK has developed a new experiment that could lead to the first-ever traversable wormhole, enabling a form of teleportation called "counterportation."
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🎤 It’s How They Said It
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
– George Bernard Shaw
🧮 The numbers game
$335,000 USD is the annual upper salary range for a Prompt Engineer position, which has been jokingly referred to as the “AI Whisperer” job.
$1.99 USD per prompt is the lower range of how much freelance Prompt Engineers are selling custom ChatGPT prompts on the Prompt Marketplace.
If you do the math, at that rate, a freelancer would have to sell approximately 168,342 prompts in order to make the same annual salary of $335,000 per year.
Speaking of doing math, do you remember last month’s numbers story about rapper 50 Cent’s bottle of wine selling for $325,000 dollars? I had asked how much that comes out to per sip and we got a really good response from one of our readers - Andrew White. His full answer was:
According to a study I found, a healthy adult swallows about 14ml per “sip”. So there are about 53 and a half sips in a bottle, coming out to about USD $6,075 per sip. Two or three sips could buy you a new Chevrolet Spark. 🤯
⚒️ Tools and Resources
GPT Uncensored: A community-powered collection of many different jailbreak prompts for ChatGPT. Prompts get validated by the community via upvoting and downvoting (Reddit style) so you can see which ones are still working, and which ones have probably been patched up by OpenAI.
If there is one thing that is certain at the moment, is that we are living in times of extreme uncertainty. On the one hand we have AI experts like Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that artificial intelligence is going to wipe out humanity, and on the other hand we have other experts like Ray Kurzweil claiming it’s going to help us achieve immortality. Two very opposite outcome predictions, by two highly-credentialed individuals.
Something similar is happening with the “AI is going to take our jobs” versus the “AI is going to make our jobs easier” conversations.
Of course the driving force behind all of these polarizing positions is AI technology, but if you take a step back, on an even broader level, it’s change. The driving force is change. We are living through a massive shift at the moment and we’re watching it unfold in front of us, in real-time. Whether you find it exciting or a bit nerve-wracking - or both - we’ll be here covering it. No matter how bizarro things might get.
If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed it, then sign up here to get all future editions.
Have a great month,
– Martin
A fascinating roundup of tech’s weird and cautionary side, from massive surveillance data leaks to automated support bot failures backfiring. I took it from https://uno-online.io/
I love how it mixes serious discussions about AI with quirky, offbeat stories—you get the sense that anything can happen in tech today. The contrast between Yudkowsky predicting AI extinction and Kurzweil forecasting immortality is mind-bending. It really makes you think about how much change AI is bringing to our lives, both exciting and terrifying. Substack seems like the perfect home for this kind of content.
https://escaperoad.org