The “singularity” is here — according to Sam Altman, who we’d wager has an ulterior motive behind promoting this claim.
The OpenAI CEO harbingered this sea-changing paradigm shift on a podcast over the weekend.
“We are now, like, in the singularity,” Altman said on the latest episode of “Relentless,” as spotted by Business Insider.
Definitions vary, but the singularity is generally defined as the moment that the capabilities of thinking machines might start to accelerate at a pace beyond humankind’s control, possibly leading to the creation of a powerful superintelligence.
Whether that’s actually happening right now is dubious. But Altman has a lot tied up in hyping the idea, and he’s been doing it for a long time. In a blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity” published almost exactly a year ago, he claimed humankind is “past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” saying we were close to building the much-vaunted superintelligence.
“Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way,” Altman said on the podcast. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”
Altman’s comments come days after OpenAI claimed that several of its AI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and, mysteriously, an “even more capable pre-release model,” broke out of their research environment, gained access to the internet, and hacked their way into a database to find the answers for cybersecurity tests.
Hugging Face, the open source AI platform whose database the AIs raided, confirmed it had been hit with an intrusion “run by an autonomous agent framework executing many thousands of individual actions.”
Ostensibly, this was an urgent warning shot of how powerful AI systems have become. It was widely hailed as OpenAI’s “Mythos moment,” a reference to how its competitor Anthropic made headlines several months ago, when its Mythos model apparently broke out of containment in similar fashion. That comparison isn’t necessarily a compliment: Anthropic was heavily criticized for using the incident as a form of fear-based marketing, and some have speculated that OpenAI is treating the event like a similar publicity stunt.
In any case, the incidents do feed into Altman’s claims that we’re living in a moment when advancements in AI may soon spiral beyond human control. If their models are as powerful as their creators say they are, they’re capable of making mincemeat out of our feeble human cybersecurity measures. Anthropic has been beating this drum, too: last month, it called for a global “pause” on AI development, claiming that the tech was on a path to achieving recursive self-improvement, or the ability to constantly improve themselves on their own.
Of course, Altman says what he’s doing isn’t fearmongering.
Taking a thinly veiled snipe at Anthropic: “I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,” he said on the podcast, per BI. “I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.”
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