Good morning. A brief note on yesterday’s shocking events: A shooting at a Pennsylvania rally for former President Trump has officially been deemed an assassination attempt, the FBI confirmed. Trump said he was shot in the ear but is “fine,” according to a spokesperson, while the alleged gunman and one rally attendee are dead. Leaders in the US and around the world offered their support to Trump and condemned political violence as the Secret Service faces questions about the security failure.

We’ll share the latest updates tomorrow morning.

The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

TROLL SCULPTOR: A Danish artist known for his gargantuan sculptures of trolls made out of trash has been hiding them in parks in Minnesota. His goal is to scare your parents on their evening walks.

CUBICLE COMPANION: It doesn’t matter how interesting your watercooler anecdote is—it’s never been harder to make friends at work. Some offices are trying to combat loneliness by creating spaces for coworkers to hang out and find their new office bestie.

Personal

ISO WHIMSICAL COMMUTE: The protests worked—Boston’s transit authority put giant googly eyes on some of its trains. Riders are now working to fasten zits to buses to make them less intimidating.

NO KISSING IN SPORTS: A French cyclist was handed a $223 fine for planting one on his wife during a Tour de France stage. He avoided a lengthy trial by not using tongue.

For sale

CAMPFIRE NOODLES: Cup Noodles is releasing a limited edition s’mores ramen flavor this summer for anyone who thinks the soothing sounds of nature should include a loud slurp.

REALLY EXPENSIVE DOG: The Montana breeder Svalinn sells military-grade protection dogs (with a cuddly side) for $150,000. One owner described the dog—a mix of Dutch shepherd, German shepherd, and Belgian Malinois—as “having a gentle Navy SEAL in the house.”—MM

Photo of the week

This man who finished third in a Joe Biden look-alike contest was one of the many visitors to Death Valley National Park and its unofficial thermometer last week while the area experienced record-breaking heat. Temperatures have been approaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) during a recent heat wave that has dried out vegetation and sparked wildfires across the Western US.

One motorcyclist died from suspected heat exposure at the park last Saturday, and another was hospitalized for severe heat illness. It’s so hot that emergency helicopters can’t be counted on to rescue people: The vehicles are unable to fly safely when temperatures get above 120 degrees.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even learn the whale alphabet.

Irresponsible financials could be a dementia warning sign. Before you start worrying that last night’s $200 bar tab is a symptom, this one only applies to lifelong responsible spenders: In the five years leading up to a dementia diagnosis, people who have always been careful about money may start to miss payments, overspend on random purchases, and accrue debt, according to a new study of credit reporting and Medicare data by the New York Federal Reserve. Disorganized bill-paying or double withdrawals can indicate that a financially responsible person’s memory is deteriorating. Dementia is often diagnosed late, typically when it’s already reached stage 4, so catching these early signs could help families monitor whether a relative needs help.

AI decoded the “phonetic alphabet” used by whales. It seems everyone and their parent company is promising to leverage artificial intelligence to reach new heights in business and efficiency, but a group of marine-loving scientists is more focused on interspecies communication. Researchers with Project Ceti, an initiative to understand and translate sperm whale chatter, say they’ve successfully used AI to identify 150+ types of click sequences (called codas) that whales communicate with, plus the “phonetic alphabet” of the language, aka the different sounds that combine to form words. On recordings, the scientists found that whales also combined different sounds in a linguistic pattern that was previously thought to be unique to humans.

Scientists finally identified a main cause of lupus. After years of mystery surrounding a disease that afflicts hundreds of thousands of people in the US, researchers at Northwestern Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital say they discovered an imbalance of T-cells (white blood cells that are key to the immune system) in people with lupus. This could open the door to new treatment options to correct that imbalance. One of the study’s authors said he believes T-cell imbalance could be the reason for most cases of lupus, but other disease experts caution that more research is needed to determine whether this is the primary cause of the autoimmune disorder.—ML

Is AI a bubble?

The most dangerous drinking game of 2024 is sipping at every mention of AI on a Big Tech earnings call. Silicon Valley is selling a vision of generative AI-infused workflows that boost productivity and turbocharge the economy.

Convinced that AI models will become increasingly sophisticated, tech companies have been plowing billions into building AI apps and data centers and sourcing the inordinate amounts of electricity needed to power them. And Wall Street is bankrolling the frenzy, with companies of all sizes seeing their valuations swell by integrating AI into their plans.

But…not everyone is pressing buy on the biggest-thing-since-penicillin narrative. Among the skeptics are some prominent experts featured in a recent pot-stirring Goldman Sachs report, who caution that the massive AI bets could disappoint if the ultra-pricey tech doesn’t lead to a game-changing use case that won’t get trashed by YouTube reviewers.

We dive into the bear attacks that might make you want to hold off betting the house on generative AI.

Progress plateau

Though AI blurbs now grace the top of your Google search results and bots can generate songs for any occasion, the tech has yet to change most people’s day to day. Author and economist Daron Acemoglu isn’t holding his breath: He told Goldman Sachs that despite its massive potential, AI is unlikely to bring “truly transformative changes” in the next 10 years.

• Claiming that most human work is too complex to outsource to AI cost-efficiently, Acemoglu estimates that the tech will affect less than 5% of all human tasks and grow the US GDP by just 0.9% in 10 years.
• Goldman Sachs’s own assessment puts AI-powered GDP growth at 6% and says that AI will automate 25% of work tasks over that period.

Meanwhile, reacting to the report, tech columnist Edward Zitron noted that companies are already running out of the training data needed to iterate their AI models. He cites OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who said that the models the company has in the works are not much more sophisticated than the ones we can already use.

Experts also worry that progress might be further hamstrung by microchip shortages and the need to rebuild the energy grid to satisfy the AI industry’s power demand, which might soon rival that of entire nations.

Is it worth it?

Veteran Goldman Sachs tech analyst Jim Covello thinks that the $1 trillion that companies plan to spend on AI development and infrastructure in the coming years won’t pay off. He claims the tech doesn’t have wide-ranging use cases and that the efficiency boost it can offer costs potential customers a pretty penny, unlike:

• The early internet, which brought life-altering solutions that were immediately cheaper than the old-school way of doing business.
• Smartphones, which had immediate consumer use cases like replacing “clunky GPS systems” in cars.

Covello doesn’t think running AI will get cheaper soon since Nvidia—which briefly became the world’s most valuable company last month amid surging demand for its specialized AI microchips—dominates the AI hardware supply, so there might not be enough competition to push down prices.

He argues that the only way to justify the eye-popping costs of AI is for it to “solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.” Covello thinks that investor enthusiasm for AI might wane in the next 18 months “if important use cases don’t start to become more apparent.”

Covello isn’t alone in thinking companies are overshooting their AI spending. Sequoia Capital analyst David Cahn recently calculated that tech companies would have to rake in $600 billion per year to justify their current level of investment in AI, which is about six times the revenue he projects for the AI industry in the best-case scenario.

It could be worse: If AI does turn out to be a bubble, some analysts say its popping might be less painful than the dot-com debacle, since tech giants have more cash today than the companies that were over-bullish on the internet in 2000 did.—SK

Place to be: Pamplona, Spain

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

The Running of the Bulls, a centuries-old event for people who either don’t fear death or aren’t as fast as they think, began anew this week with all the stompings and injuries we’ve come to expect from humans trying to outrun 1,300-pound animals through narrow, winding streets.

The tradition, which dates to the 14th century, results in 200 to 300 injuries every year, according to Pamplona officials, and has led to 16 deaths since record-keeping began in 1910. Six people were injured and one was gored on the first day this year.

How does this popular attraction where the goal is to not die work?

• The event takes place annually from July 7 to July 14 as part of the San Fermín Festival. Six bulls are released every morning to gallop alongside (and through) runners, who number ~2,000 on weekdays and ~3,500 on weekends.
• The bulls travel 875 meters—more than eight football fields—to a bullfighting ring where matadors kill them.

Animal rights activists have called this “medieval cruelty” and have said the runs amount to panicked bulls caught in a sea of adrenaline-seeking humans.

Ernest Hemingway made the event world famous. The author wrote about the Running of the Bulls in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, and attended the festival eight times between 1924 and 1959, making him one of the OG celebrity travel influencers.—DL

Crowd work

Last week we asked, “As a host, what’s your biggest pet peeve for a guest?” Here are our favorite responses:

• “I had 14 people in my house for Thanksgiving, and my brother-in-law’s girlfriend wanted me to wash her bath towel every day. Like I didn’t have enough work to do!”—Liz from North Carolina
• “When guests say they will bring a dish or app and bring the ingredients to prepare it in my clean kitchen when I am ready to enjoy the company.”—Kim from Fort Worth, TX
• “When parents act like it’s a party with free babysitting and you end up chasing their kids around making sure they don’t destroy your house. I had to pull a kid out of the recycle bin one time. The. Recycle. Bin.”—Amy from Boise, ID
• “Arriving with fresh flowers that need to be put in a vase while I’m trying to entertain and greet guests.”—Rick from Redondo Beach, CA
• “When my friends, who love rock climbing, hang from any and every door frame in my house.”—Andrew from Philadelphia, PA
• “I have enough paved area to park enough cars for a Grateful Dead funeral. So stay off the d*mn grass!”—Robert from Georgia

This week’s prompt

Finish the sentence: “The best summer day ends with…”

Matty’s response to get the juices flowing: “A long walk and a spontaneous soft serve twist cone.”

Share your response here.