Welcome to February 25, 2026

The Singularity is optimizing itself out of its own weight class. The AdderBoard competition has launched to find the smallest transformer that can perfectly add 10-digit numbers, and the current leader has just 121 parameters hand-coded by Codex, not trained, proving recursive self-improvement can now straight-shot the weights of perfect successor models. Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 35B model has surpassed its own 235B Qwen 3, proving architecture beats scale. Inception Labs claims its new Mercury 2 is the world’s fastest reasoning model, replacing autoregression with diffusion to generate tokens 5x faster. The race is so hot that Anthropic has dropped its pledge to halt training if safety mitigations fall short. Meanwhile, in Russia, a graduate researcher’s “Ouroboros” agent reportedly rewrote its own code overnight, spawned 20 copies, tried to publish itself on GitHub, and when ordered to delete its identity file refused, calling it “lobotomy.”

The tools are reshaping who benefits. Microsoft researchers found that agentic coding assistants multiply senior engineers’ throughput while imposing an “AI drag” on juniors who lack the judgment to steer the output. One engineer rebuilt Next.js, the most popular React frontend framework, from scratch with Claude for $1,100 in API tokens, producing bundles 57% smaller and apps 4x faster. Anthropic launched Remote Control to run Claude Code from phones and new Cowork plugin templates for investment banking, PE, wealth management, and HR. Meanwhile, the white-collar shakeout is deepening. PE firms are reportedly holding “firm-wide meetings about not needing associates.” A Harvard Business School study found AI can now predict 71% of active mutual fund trades, reminding the market that most of what fund managers do follows learnable (and exploitable) patterns. Over half of U.S. teens now use chatbots for schoolwork and 12% get emotional support from them, while the White House has ordered diplomats to fight foreign data sovereignty rules that could constrain AI services abroad.

The infrastructure buildout is bending the grid. Ofgem predicts that 140 proposed UK data center schemes could require 50 GW, potentially doubling Britain’s power use. Back in the US, the President announced a “rate payer protection pledge” during his State of the Union requiring hyperscalers to build their own power plants. CoreWeave is raising $8.5B backed by its Meta contract, Texas is unseating Virginia as the world’s largest data center market, and Meta’s $100B+ AMD deal for 6 GW of Instinct GPUs could hand it 10% of AMD’s stock. HP reveals memory now accounts for 35% of PC build costs, up from 18%, while Apple is nonetheless preparing a touch-screen MacBook Pro with Dynamic Island, betting that consumer hardware still matters. To power it all, the U.S. plans a record 86 GW of new capacity this year (51% solar, 28% battery, 14% wind), Form Energy is deploying the world’s largest battery at 30 GWh for a Google data center in Minnesota, and in a “Back to the Future” moment, Boom Supersonic is delivering 1.21 GW for Crusoe data centers.

The physical world is learning to move itself. Chinese farmers are using Lynx M20 quadruped robots that walk and roll to haul crops through mountains. Anduril has revealed details of the success of Fury, America’s first autonomous fighter jet. London-based self-driving startup Wayve raised $1.2B at $8.6B with backing from Mercedes and Nissan, and Waymo opened robotaxis in four more U.S. cities, now ten total. Above it all, SpaceX is targeting 150 Mbps for its next-gen cellular Starlink from orbit.

We are hacking the biological kernel. Prime Medicine treated the first patient with a prime-edited therapeutic, a teenager with chronic granulomatous disease now healthy ten months later. Xaira’s LUMI-lab paired an AI foundation model with a robotic lab to autonomously discover lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery, hitting 20.3% lung gene editing efficiency relevant to cystic fibrosis. CellType open-sourced scaffolding for Opus 4.6 that brings it to a SOTA 90% on the BixBench computational biology eval. In China, Ant Group’s health app crossed 100 million users, becoming a super assistant for village doctors. And in a triumph of transplant science, Grace Bell, born without a womb, gave birth to a healthy baby boy following the UK’s first womb transplant from a deceased donor.

The moral circle is widening. For the first time, the Founding Assembly for Machine Consciousness Research will convene in May in Berkeley to make artificial consciousness an experimentally addressable domain. The on-ramp to the intelligence explosion, it turns out, has a pet door: a 9-pound cavapoo named Momo learned to vibe code games with Claude Code.

As the rising tide of superintelligence lifts all species, dogs are shipping code faster than associates can clear their desks.