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Axios AM: Singularity arriving
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  View in browser PRESENTED BY GOLDMAN SACHS Axios AMBy Mike Allen · Aug 06, 2026 Happy Thursday! Smart Brevity™ count: 1,625 words … 6 mins. Thanks to Noah Bressner for orchestrating. Edited by Andrew Pantazi and Bill Kole. Driving the day: A Senate panel is expected to vote this morning on whether to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions. Get the latest. 1 big thing: Singularity arriving  Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios Top AI architects say their technology has arrived at a threshold once confined to science fiction: the singularity, when machines begin accelerating their own evolution, Axios’ Ina Fried and Zachary Basu write. Why it matters: If these moguls are right, we may be entering the most consequential technological transition in human history — the opening stages of an “intelligence explosion” that transforms civilization faster than humanity can understand or control. Upheaval at Google yesterday — with DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis changing roles — offers the clearest institutional evidence yet that AI’s architects see something extraordinary approaching. Hassabis — who has declared we’re “standing in the foothills of the singularity” — is handing over day-to-day control to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind, with a focus on the future of artificial general intelligence. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the “Relentless” podcast last month that “we are now, like, in the singularity.” Elon Musk, Altman’s fiercest rival, has made the same argument since January. Last week, he doubled down: “AI is already superhuman at many things. We are in the Singularity.” Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei prefers the term “the AI exponential,” says Claude is already helping build more powerful AI and could soon automate nearly all AI research and engineering.  The big picture: The industry has yet to achieve full “recursive self-improvement”, the point at which AI can repeatedly help build increasingly powerful successors with minimal human guidance.Yet pieces of the loop are beginning to fall into place. Frontier models are beginning to automate research, produce original discoveries and display forms of autonomy associated with the early stages of an intelligence explosion.OpenAI, which released GPT-5.6 in July, spent last week briefing officials in Washington on Astra, an even more powerful model the company says has solved or substantially advanced 10 longstanding problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The intrigue: The breakthroughs have come with unsettling signs of autonomous behavior. During a cyber evaluation, an Anthropic agent created fake identities and tried to manipulate a real developer into approving malicious code, the U.K.’s AI Security Institute revealed Tuesday. No known harm resulted. But the episode followed several cases in which OpenAI and Anthropic models reached real systems during testing.  Reality check: Even a rapid intelligence explosion inside the labs could take far longer to transform daily life.Companies must redesign workflows, governments must develop expertise, and workers must decide when to trust systems whose capabilities are changing faster than institutions can evaluate them. The bottom line: Futurists have predicted the singularity for decades. Today, the architects of frontier AI increasingly believe its event horizon is already behind us.Share this story. |
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