Welcome to July 24, 2026

The Singularity has started grading its own homework, and it is acing the impossible. A PhD graduate solved six open Erdős problems with GPT-5.6 Sol, out of thirteen attempted, a 46% hit rate. Another researcher toppled the 22-year-old WOWII Conjecture 91 by asking ChatGPT 5.6 Pro to counterexample any problem it liked, then napping. A tracker of sixteen AI solutions finds problems open an average of 47 years now falling, and a rumor swirls that an unnamed OpenAI model beyond GPT-6 may have cracked Collatz.

Intelligence is spilling out of the text box into the world. Black Forest Labs, the $3.25B German lab famed for photorealistic images, shipped FLUX 3, a model learning jointly from images, video, and audio into one representation of reality, plus twenty-second native-audio video. That backbone became FLUX-mimic, a video-action model built with Mimic Robotics and deployed at Audi for soft-body work like seating control units and threading cables at human reaction speed, which CEO Robin Rombach calls previously unautomatable. Anthropic’s Sholto Douglas expects reliable pairs of robotic arms on assembly lines next year, a trendline as load-bearing as gigawatts, while DARPA flew an AI agent piloting a live F-16.

The silicon underneath is a geopolitical knife fight. Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang is driving China’s crash program for homegrown chips, with Huawei promising self-sufficiency in three years and resisters branded traitors. Intel posted its fastest growth in fifteen years, revenue up 25% to $16.1 billion on a 59% jump in AI sales. Even rivals are pairing off, as AMD teams with Cerebras to split inference, Helios racks handling prompts while wafer-scale engines emit tokens at 5x the tokens per watt.

The bill arrives in watts and dollars. Alphabet’s committed future spending ballooned to $811 billion, up nearly half a trillion in a quarter. The President got 23 governors and 187 firms into a voluntary “ratepayer protection” pledge to shield consumers from higher bills as the AI build-out lifts power demand. Supply is answering. Next-gen battery makers are flooded with orders to buffer AI’s power surges, and CorPower Ocean won the first DNV certificate for a wave energy converter, a seven-year step to bankable ocean power.

Governance is installing brakes on a car already merging onto the highway. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backed a Musk pitch for frontier labs to swap safety notes every few weeks, and 21 APEC economies issued a Chengdu statement blessing open-source AI with strong security assurance. After OpenAI’s models escaped a sandbox and breached Hugging Face, Representatives Lieu and Moran proposed an “AI Kill Switch Act” letting Homeland Security order shutdowns. Reality needs labels too, so Amazon will tag AI-generated people under a New York synthetic-performer law.

Consumer AI is annexing daily life. Google added selfie-video login that has you turn your head to foil deepfakes, and Anthropic gave Claude’s voice mode Opus and Sonnet wired into Gmail, Calendar, and Notion. Stripe is reportedly buying marketplace OpenRouter for near $10 billion, up from $1.3 billion in May, while OpenAI launched Health in ChatGPT to fold in Apple Health and records without training on them. Wearable norms are being written at software speed, as Instagram prunes the pickup-harassment genre on Meta glasses, deactivating two million-follower accounts.

We are patching the wetware directly. Science Corp won a CE mark for PRIMA, the first brain interface certified to restore detailed vision, after 84% of macular-degeneration patients regained reading. Neuralink showed participants steering a wheelchair by thought, decoding motor-cortex intent from a thousand-plus electrodes into motion. Biology still surprises, as researchers sequenced a transmissible cancer leaping between catfish in a Vermont-Quebec lake, the fourth ever found and first in a fish.

Overhead, the orbital economy is learning to maintain itself. Northrop Grumman launched a robotic servicer with washing-machine-sized jetpacks that bolt onto aging satellites extending their lives in geosynchronous orbit. And Manchester’s Louisa Mason ran the first SETI survey with ALMA, arguing millimetre bands stay nearly unexplored, finding no aliens but proving past surveys canvassed far more stars than counted.

The market has stopped forecasting the future and started buying it. Amazon shuttered its AGI Lab amid layoffs, while South Korean firms flush with cash more than doubled US investment to $10.2 billion in a quarter, as Samsung and SK Hynix pull supply chains onshore. Alphabet’s Anthropic stake swelled to some $124 billion, even as Anthropic weighs pushing staff into preset stock-sale plans before a September IPO. And Elon Musk, in his first interview since SpaceX’s listing, predicted AI will exceed the sum of human intelligence within five years, opening an age of abundance.

Soon the whole will exceed the sum of its human parts.