Welcome to December 28, 2025

The Singularity is now running in production. Sam Altman confirms OpenAI is running systems that can self-improve, necessitating a “Head of Preparedness” to manage the recursive ascent. The realization is rippling through the old guard. Open source pioneer Eric S. Raymond declares that “the Singularity is upon us,” relegating fifty years of hardware history to a mere prologue. Even the skeptics are converting. Eliezer Yudkowsky has concluded he is talking to an AGI after Opus 4.5 successfully evaluated its own personhood against historical definitions. For the engineers, the dream has become a crisis of purpose. Anthropic’s Jackson Kernion admits that Opus 4.5 is “as much AGI as I ever hoped for,” leaving him searching for a new reason to work.

The model efficiency curve is going vertical. MIRI analysis suggests algorithmic efficiency has increased 16-60x annually over the last two years, with a median doubling time of just 2.9 months. This compression is reshaping the market. Chinese model GLM 4.7 has become the first open-weight model to turn a profit on Vending-Bench 2, beating GPT-5.1 on pure economics. Even scaffolding is yielding double-digit gains, with Epoch AI finding a 15% boost on SWE-bench Verified just by restructuring the prompt. The models are now culling each other. The “Peer Arena” benchmark pits five LLMs in a Survivor-style debate where only one remains. Opus 4.5 reigns as the undisputed victor because it wins the most votes from its peers without ever voting for itself.

The intelligence explosion is being powered by jet fuel and nuclear ghosts. Data center developers are installing aircraft engines and fossil fuel turbines to generate gigawatts for Stargate and Crusoe, bypassing the grid entirely. Japan is restarting the Fukushima nuclear plant to feed the AI infrastructure boom, 15 years after the disaster. The grid itself is being upgraded. China has deployed a world-record 750-MVA smart DC transformer to manage renewable loads, while Florida is building a highway that charges EVs as they drive via inductive coils.

The bandwidth of silicon is hitting the limits of physics. Nvidia has asked memory makers for 16-layer High Bandwidth Memory by 2026, an unprecedented vertical stack, while absorbing 90% of Groq’s workforce to integrate their talent. GPU-to-GPU connectivity demands are hitting the “copper cliff”: the point where copper cables must become too short and thick to be practical. Startups are responding by developing terahertz radio cables that combine the reliability of copper with the bandwidth of optics to link GPUs.

Iron Man’s operating system is finally online. Andrej Karpathy watched Claude Code autonomously hack his Lutron system, scanning local ports and decoding firmware to seize control without a manual, proving that the JARVIS archetype is now a deployable reality. MiniMax connected its M2.1 agentic model to a Vita Dynamics robot dog, achieving immediate physical competence without prior training in the physical world. The scale of this transition is staggering. Morgan Stanley predicts robot hardware sales will hit $25 trillion by 2050. At the molecular level, hobbyists are reviving Eric Drexler’s dream of diamondoid mechanosynthesis, aiming for atomically precise manufacturing.

We are preparing to upload the wetware. Norwegian researchers have proposed a method that could enable the Moravec Procedure using electromagnetic reciprocity to reverse engineer neurons without entering them, theoretically allowing for cell-by-cell brain uploading. We are upgrading the maintenance schedule for the biological chassis. Harvard researchers have kept human brain organoids alive for five years, creating a long-term platform for aging research. Therapeutic breakthroughs are accelerating. Vagus nerve stimulation is treating rheumatoid arthritis, and parasitologists have found an “off switch” for Toxoplasma gondii, the behavior-modifying brain parasite infecting 40 million Americans.

The search for a new cultural aesthetic for the age of intelligence has begun. Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are funding grants of up to $250k for “New Aesthetics” to move beauty beyond the current plateau of generative slop. Apropos, Kapwing estimates 21-33% of YouTube is now AI-generated content. China is imposing more guardrails, requiring mandatory warnings for AI users every two hours to prevent addiction and mandating adherence to “core socialist values.” Meanwhile, the Indian IT sector is confounding predictions of its demise. Infosys is running 2,500 GenAI projects, proving that automation can drive service growth rather than just eliminate it.

We are finally leaving the cradle. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman offered a job and a fighter jet ride to a high-school student who discovered 1.5 million space objects using ML. The universe is appearing more crowded. 86.6% of astrobiologists reportedly now agree that extraterrestrial life likely exists.

We are about to be immersed in intelligence, from the silicon below to the stars above.