Wildfires force Los Angeles app developer to use his own technology to navigate crisis
The wind whips embers while firefighters battle the fire in the Angeles National Forest near Mt. Wilson as the wildfires burn in the Los Angeles area, during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, U.S. January 9, 2025.
Ringo Chiu | Reuters
For almost two years, Viktor Makarskyy has been working on an app that serves as a digital survival kit to help people in disaster zones, which are getting more numerous seemingly by the day given the pace of climate change.
He never imagined his work and personal life would collide in such a profound way.
On Wednesday night, Makarskyy was flying home to Los Angeles from an anniversary trip with his wife in the Cascade Mountains, in the Pacific Northwest. An evacuation order for the Sunset Fire had already been issued extending to just a few blocks from their apartment.
Makarskyy was terrified that the fire would reach their home before they could rescue their cat and collect critical belongings.
“It’s one thing to see pictures online,” Makarskyy told CNBC in an interview Friday, “it’s another thing to see it out the plane window and to have this multisensory experience of your cabin smelling like smoke as you land. It was like entering a war zone.”
Makarskyy is the head of technology at GOES, a startup founded in 2021 with a focus on providing critical health advice and services, mostly in remote areas. Aid workers and intrepid travelers can download the GOES Health app and get quick localized tips on how to deal with bug and animal bites, altitude illnesses, rashes and a host of other challenges.
Hikers can gauge hypothermia risk, and backpackers can plan out how to prepare for a heat wave or look up how to temporarily set a broken bone. All content is written or approved by wilderness medicine doctors, and everything can be accessed offline other than real-time weather and the app’s wildlife risk index.
Increasingly, GOES, which stands for Global Outdoor Emergency Support, is becoming relevant in a much more widespread way, as people in urban environments have to deal with sudden disaster due to hurricanes, tornadoes and catastrophic fires. Since Jan. 6, a day before the LA fires broke out, GOES has seen about an 800% spike in usage in the area, and over the past two weeks the number of new users in California has tripled, the company said.
As of Monday, the massive blazes across LA had killed at least 24 people, obliterated whole neighborhoods and burned thousands of homes and structures. No cause has been identified for the largest fires.
The GOES team with CEO Camilo Barcenas.
Courtesy: GOES
Makarskyy said he uses GOES to check air quality, national alerts, wildfire preparedness guides and more. Back at home, he said, he was surprised to see that although one of the most widely used weather apps showed the air quality around Los Angeles International Airport to be “moderate,” when he viewed a hyperlocal, more precise air quality measurement using GOES, it showed the air quality to be much worse.
“As the developer of this app, I knew it offered exact latitude and longitude,” he said.
GOES is far from alone in seeing a spike in usage due to the rise in disasters. The Watch Duty app, founded in 2021 and developed by a nonprofit group, has become practically ubiquitous in the LA area since the fires erupted. It was the top free app on iOS for much of last week and was still in the top five on Monday, providing LA residents with a precise reading on where fires are burning and spreading, which neighborhoods are in evacuation zones and the location of power outages.
In a post on X on Friday, Watch Duty wrote, “Our systems remain 100% operational while our radio operators sleep in shifts and our engineers are throwing everything they have at it to sustain up to 100,000 requests per second with an average response time of <20 ms.”
Watch Duty was developed by firefighters, dispatchers and first responders specifically to disseminate information related to fires. GOES, by contrast, stumbled into the fire safety market.
According to the GOES app’s launch announcement in 2023, Dr. Grant Lipman, a former professor at Stanford Emergency Medicine and director of its wilderness medicine fellowship, started the company “after treating a hiker in critical condition due to a rattlesnake bite” and seeing the need “to make wilderness medicine more accessible.”
‘The outdoors is changing’
GOES co-founder and CEO Camilo Barcenas spent years in the health-care space and worked for four years overseeing technology at the Stanford Adult Hospital. In 2019, he and his team began working on the GOES project, interviewing people in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East about what would have made them feel safer and more prepared when traveling off the grid.
Their realization, he said, was that health care was “so broken systematically,” that the only way to improve is if people learn to take care of themselves first.
“We made this because we believe everyone should have this,” Barcenas said. “The outdoors is changing, and we need to be able to understand what these risks are so we can do better.”
Barcenas said that when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September, he flew in to inform residents and aid groups about how they can use the platform. It’s become increasingly clear, he said, how useful the app can be when climate disasters strike.
“The LA wildfires highlight an acceleration of what we’ve been tracking: the democratization of wilderness medicine for urban survival,” Barcenas said. “When environmental emergencies strike, traditional emergency services and health-care facilities often become overwhelmed or inaccessible.”
Firefighters continue their work in the burning residential areas as wildfires continue to wreak havoc, reaching their fifth day and leaving extensive damage in residential areas in Los Angeles, California, United States on January 12, 2025.
Lokman Vural Elibol | Anadolu | Getty Images
Before arriving back in LA, Makarskyy said, he prepared for his return by checking national alerts within GOES, such as high-wind advisories, air quality and the location of wildfires. Each alert came with access to content written by wilderness medicine doctors on preparation and mitigation techniques.
He read up on “what to do in breathing problem scenarios” related to those alerts. He said he learned that N95 masks are “the only thing that can protect against particulates that are that fine, that small.”
“So rather than buying common surgical masks,” Makarskyy said, “I went ahead and bought the right product for us to keep our lungs safe in this environment.”
Makarskyy said he and his wife were fortunate not to have to evacuate. The fires were far enough away that they were safe but close enough that on Friday morning they woke up to ash coating their car. The closest fire had been contained. Their cat was safe with them.
The GOES app has some features that are free. Users can check on air quality and sunburn risk in their location and see if there’s any extreme weather advisory. For premium access, which includes pocket safety guide information, subscribers pay $6 a month or $36 a year.
Barcenas said there are a lot of new features on the way and that the app has already evolved significantly since launching less than two years ago.
“GOES was originally developed for outdoor adventurers to prepare for trips and manage wilderness medical emergencies with offline, visual first-aid guides,” Barcenas said. “Now, we’re seeing urban residents using it to understand their outdoor health risks and navigating emergencies during environmental crises.”
WATCH: California wildfires will be a $20 billion plus loss for insurers: Wells Fargo’s Elyse Greenspan
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Thursday rolled out Nano Banana Pro, its latest image editing and generation tool, continuing the company’s momentum after launching its new Gemini artificial intelligence model earlier this week.
The product is built on Gemini 3 Pro, which was announced on Tuesday and contributed to record-breaking stock highs.
Alphabet’s stock was up 4% Thursday.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that the Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities expand beyond its original iteration, which launched in late August.
“It’s incredible at infographics. It can make slide decks. It can take up to 14 different images, or five different characters, and sort of keep that character consistency,” he said.
He added that internal users have experimented with the feature by inputting code snippets and even LinkedIn resumes to create infographics.
“I think this ability to visualize things that were previously maybe not something you would think of as a visual medium that tends to be one of the magic things people are finding with it,” Woodward said.
The original Nano Banana went viral on social media as users turned photos of themselves or their pets into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Woodward wrote in an X post in September that the product helped add 13 million new users to the Gemini app in the span of four days.
Nano Banana Pro is currently available in the Gemini app, with limited free quotas, Google’s writing assistant, NotebookLM, as well as the company’s developer, enterprise and advertising products.
Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will have access to the product in Google’s search features AI Mode.
The feature will later also roll out to Ultra subscribers first in Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool.
Google introduced another feature in the Gemini app that allows users to upload any image to find out if it was generated by Google AI.
Images generated on free Nano Banana accounts will have a watermark, but it will be removed for Google AI Ultra tier subscribers.
Google has been working to gain ground on OpenAI in the generative AI race, which ignited after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Last week, OpenAI announced two updates to its GPT-5 model to make it “warmer by default and more conversational” as well as ” more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use,” the company said.
ChatGPT currently tops the list of free apps on Apple’s App Store, with Gemini in the second spot.
The Gemini app currently has over 650 million monthly active users per month, and Gemini-powered AI Overviews has 2 billion monthly users, Google said in a release. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in October that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users.
Woodward said Google AI products have had growing demand, with many users signing up for Gemini’s subscription plan to have “higher limits with some of these advanced models.”
“We’re seeing high numbers of people coming to lots of these products,” he said. “That’s really the best problem to have, is there’s a lot of demand, and we’re trying to figure out actually how to serve it.”
The company is looking to continue scaling its AI offerings, Woodward said, highlighting Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool, and Genie, a “world building” model that is currently available as a limited research preview.
Technology
U.S. greenlights AI chip exports to Gulf tech giants after Saudi Crown Prince’s Washington visit
U.S. President Donald Trump and Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia stand for a photo with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other participants at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 19, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
The U.S. has approved sales of advanced Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and the United Arab Emirates’ G42, authorizing the state-backed firms to buy up to 35,000 chips, worth an estimated $1 billion.
The approval of these chip exports marks a major reversal for the U.S., which had previously balked at the idea of direct exports to state-backed AI companies in the Gulf. Export controls were put into place to avoid advanced American technology making its way to China through the back door of Gulf Arab states.
Before former President Joe Biden left office in January, he administered a final round of export restrictions on advanced AI chips, targeting companies like Nvidia, in a sweeping effort to keep that cutting-edge U.S. intellectual property out of China’s reach.
Now, President Donald Trump is moving to expand the reach of such advanced technology in order to “promote continued American AI dominance and global technological leadership,” the U.S. Commerce Department said in a statement published on Wednesday.
The U.S. Commerce Department approved the chip exports, with the condition the state-backed AI outfits agree to “rigorous security and reporting requirements,” overseen by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security.
Saudi’s Victory Lap
The export approval follows Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s trip to Washington this week where the Kingdom pledged to spend $1 trillion in the U.S., up from $600 billion originally committed during Trump’s Gulf tour in May.
“Even if we don’t get to that, both sides have skin in the game,” Afshin Molavi, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy.
Saudi Arabia’s AI company HUMAIN, backed by its nearly $1 trillion Public Investment Fund signed a long list of partnerships with Adobe, Qualcomm, AMD, Cisco, GlobalAI, Groq, Luma, and xAI at a U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum held in Washington, D.C this week. Notably, HUMAIN will be teaming up with Elon Musk’s xAI to build a 500 megawatt data center in the Kingdom.
“What we want to do in 2026 is to build the capacity equivalent to what Saudi has built in the last 20 years, in one year,” Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, said at the summit. HUMAIN is hoping to position Saudi Arabia as the third biggest global AI hub, after the likes of the U.S. and China.
Winning over the U.S. Commerce Department
Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and UAE’s G42 “have the capital to invest, the relationships with Nvidia and the (relationship with the) U.S. government,” Kamil Dimmich, partner and portfolio manager at North of South Capital, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy in an interview on Wednesday.
G42 and HUMAIN are “able to use this to build out regional infrastructure, and they want to leverage that infrastructure to become a global hub for compute,” Dimmich added.
Just two weeks ago, Microsoft secured an export license for advanced chips to the UAE. Microsoft’s key partner in the UAE is G42, but the local AI company was notably absent from the Microsoft announcement, until today.
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