The Atlantic: Altman's 'Gentle Singularity' Redefines the Term

The Atlantic argues Sam Altman is not describing the singularity the way computer scientists have used the word for six decades. In a July 25, 2026 podcast interview, the OpenAI chief executive said, 'We are now, like, in the singularity,' and almost in the same breath added, 'Any one moment is not the tipping point.' Two experts in our Who's Who directory have shared the piece.

The reframing predates the podcast. In his June 2025 essay 'The Gentle Singularity,' Altman replaces the classic image of a machine autonomously building a smarter successor with something looser: human researchers, AI systems, capital, computer chips, electricity, data centers, and robots reinforcing one another until the transformation is irreversible. On that account the takeoff has already started ('we are past the event horizon'), and the milestones fall out on a schedule he supplied: agents doing real cognitive work in 2025, systems generating novel insights in 2026, robots performing physical tasks in 2027.

The magazine's point is that the sixty-year-old technical meaning of the term, a system improving its own successor without human direction, is not what Altman is describing. His version keeps humans, capital and hardware inside the loop, which makes any current infrastructure buildout part of the transition by definition.

Altman hedges the moment himself. 'I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential, and any one moment is not the tipping point,' he told the interviewer, 'and also that we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another.'