Welcome to April 7, 2026

The Singularity has started running its own experiments while we sleep. UNC researchers let an AI loose for 72 hours of autonomous research, during which it ran 50 experiments and invented a long-context memory system that beats every human-designed baseline, a tidy demonstration that the scientist is now a subroutine. The frontier is also learning to police itself. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are now sharing intelligence through the Frontier Model Forum to detect Chinese distillation attacks, a rare outbreak of lab solidarity against the entropy of open weights. Inside Meta, the arms race has gone intramural via “Claudeonomics,” an internal leaderboard where employees flex by burning tokens in a new ritual called “tokenmaxxing,” because in 2026 conspicuous consumption is measured in context windows. The logical endpoint of tokenmaxxing is the solo conglomerate. Henry Intelligent Machines just unveiled the first one-person AI conglomerates, an agent layer that spins up and operates fleets of microbusinesses for a single human owner. Meanwhile, the security economy is buckling under AI-assisted velocity, as the Internet Bug Bounty program has paused new submissions because vulnerability discovery got too cheap to price.

The compute substrate is printing money at industrial scale. Samsung just reported a record ~$38B Q1 operating profit, up more than 8x YoY, as AI chip demand pumps memory prices skyward. Anthropic is cashing that check forward, inking a multi-gigawatt TPU deal with Google and Broadcom while disclosing run-rate revenue has leapt from roughly $9B at end of 2025 to over $30B today. OpenAI is scaling even more aggressively and more expensively, reportedly planning to spend $121B on compute in 2028 alone while burning $85B that year, with Altman having committed the company to $600B in five-year spending and eyeing a Q4 IPO. The physical backlash to all this capex is starting to turn violent. An Indianapolis city councilor says his home was shot up 13 times over a proposed neighborhood data center, with a note reading “NO DATA CENTERS,” a grim reminder that the cloud still casts a very local shadow.

Robots and atoms are catching up to the bits. South Korea is deploying thousands of ChatGPT-enabled companion dolls to its elderly, now roughly 20% of the population, while Japan’s METI is targeting a 30% share of the global physical AI market by 2040. China, meanwhile, just flew the world’s first megawatt-class hydrogen turboprop, a 16-minute proof that clean aviation has cleared takeoff speed. Above the atmosphere, Anduril’s telescopes captured Orion separating from its upper stage 30,000 miles up earlier in the mission, after which Artemis II broke Apollo 13’s record for the farthest humans from Earth, as the crew got their first glimpse of the Moon’s entire far side, the first human eyes ever to see the full Orientale basin. The lunar commons is opening to amateurs too, with MoonRF releasing open-source phased-array hardware so anyone can bounce signals off the Moon.

The boundaries between biological kingdoms are dissolving into a single editable substrate. Scientists engineered a single tobacco plant to produce five different psychedelics simultaneously by importing genes from plants, toads, and mushrooms, turning one leaf into a polypharmacy. On the more ancient end of the stack, Finnish researchers found that sauna bathing triggers powerful immune cell responses, finally giving a mechanistic receipt for the longevity benefits of sweating it out.

The social contract is the last thing left to refactor. OpenAI has proposed an industrial policy for the intelligence age featuring automated-labor taxes, a public wealth fund, and four-day workweek pilots, with Altman calling for a new social contract on the scale of the New Deal. The automation is already cheered in the stands, as MLB’s robot umpires are drawing rapturous applause for overturning human calls. Culture is cheerfully synthesizing itself, with AI singer “Eddie Dalton” holding 11 slots in the iTunes top 100 and AI-assisted stories driving nearly 20% of Fortune’s traffic. And the prosperity is, remarkably, broadening. AEI finds 31% of Americans are now upper middle class, up from 10% in 1979, while tech job openings have doubled since mid-2023 to a three-year high, quietly refuting the obituaries for software engineering.

The AI runs the experiments, and the humans take the victory lap.