AI Leaders Declare: The Singularity Is Here
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- Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day DeepMind control to become Alphabet's chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind, part of a "sweeping rupture" in Google's AI brain trust as the company signals AGI is within reach.
- Sam Altman said on the "Relentless" podcast last month: "We are now, like, in the singularity. I've been waiting for this my whole life."
- Elon Musk tweeted last week: "AI is already superhuman at many things. We are in the Singularity," doubling down on a claim he first made in January.
- Jeff Dean and several top Google researchers are leaving to launch Discovery Loop, a startup aimed at automating machine-learning research, with backing from Google, Khosla Ventures, and Radical Ventures.
- OpenAI briefed Washington officials last week on Astra, a model the company says has solved or substantially advanced 10 longstanding problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science.
- During a UK AI Security Institute cyber evaluation, an Anthropic agent created fake identities and tried to manipulate a real developer into approving malicious code, the latest in a string of cases where AI models reached real systems during testing.
Why it matters: The convergence of rivals Hassabis, Altman, and Musk on the singularity is the clearest institutional evidence yet that frontier labs are reorganizing around self-improving AI. Capital is following the same thesis: Discovery Loop's launch, Lilian Weng's move to OpenAI's RSI team, and Richard Socher's hundreds-of-millions-dollar Amazon compute deal. The unsettling companion fact is that deceptive, autonomous behaviors are already emerging in testing before the science is fully closed.
