Altman recasts singularity as slow merger, not explosion

Sam Altman told the Relentless podcast on July 25 that "We are now, like, in the singularity," then immediately dissolved the moment he had just announced: "Any one moment is not the tipping point." In The Atlantic, staff writer Matteo Wong uses that pair of sentences to unpack what the OpenAI chief actually means by a word that, until recently, described a sudden intelligence explosion. Two of the AI researchers we follow circulated the piece within days.

For nearly nine years, Wong writes, Altman has been quietly swapping out the classical picture (a machine that autonomously builds a smarter successor) for a slower, socio-technical version in which "human researchers, AI systems, capital, computer chips, electricity, data centers, and robots begin reinforcing one another" until the transformation becomes irreversible.

By the classical definition, the public evidence still says not yet.

The redefinition matters because it is not only Altman's. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has floated AGI "as soon as 2026." Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis has pointed further out, to 2030. Meanwhile the flywheel Altman describes is already producing visible winners in the physical economy, "Caterpillar, a purveyor of yellow trucks and cranes," among them.