Welcome to March 20, 2026

The Singularity is designing its own silicon. Verkor announced Design Conductor, an AI agent that autonomously built a 1.5-GHz Linux-capable RISC-V CPU from concept to tape-out-ready GDSII in 12 hours, compressing a quarterly engineering cycle into a lunch break. The algorithms feeding those chips are compressing fast. Q, a research lab pursuing a practical approximation of Solomonoff Induction, achieved 10x data efficiency improvements on NanoGPT Slowrun, using an ensemble of 1.8B-parameter models to match what standard training requires 1B tokens to accomplish. Even pre-training data is being rethought. MIT researchers showed that sequences generated by neural cellular automata transfer efficiently to natural language modeling, hinting that life’s syntax and language’s syntax share a deeper computational substrate. The mathematical frontier is yielding too. DeepMind used AlphaEvolve to establish new lower bounds for five classical Ramsey numbers, a problem Erdős himself called hopeless, and to measure this acceleration, Math Inc. launched FormalQualBench to benchmark autoformalization against graduate qualifying exams in Lean.

The tools are becoming autonomous collaborators that work while you sleep. Anthropic added asynchronous event channels to Claude Code, letting MCP servers push CI results, chat messages, and alerts so Claude can react while users are away. OpenAI revealed it has begun monitoring its own internal coding agents for misalignment, proof that the recursive loop now demands recursive oversight. OpenAI also acquired Astral, a Python developer tools startup, extending its push into the coding stack. Moving up the stack, Google introduced “vibe design” with Stitch, an AI-native canvas that turns natural language into high-fidelity UI, promptly cratering Figma’s stock by 8%. Meta is cutting third-party content moderators in favor of AI systems while simultaneously abandoning the metaverse, leaving VR on life support as the company pivots fully to intelligence.

The superintelligence demand signal is global and the supply chain is following. Anthropic surveyed 81,000 people across 159 countries in 70 languages, possibly the largest multilingual qualitative study ever, finding the top desire for AI is professional excellence at 18.8%, followed by personal transformation and life management. To deliver at scale, Anthropic is in talks with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman to form an AI consulting joint venture modeled on Palantir’s deployment playbook. The business model of expertise is being rewritten. PwC’s US boss warned that partners who resist AI “will have no place at the firm,” converting tax and consulting into subscription AI tools without a human in the loop. G42 in Abu Dhabi posted a job exclusively for AI agents, with human applications explicitly rejected. DoorDash launched Tasks, letting dashers earn by photographing dishes and recording tasks, turning gig workers into the sensory organs of the machine learning stack.

The physical world is being reorganized at every altitude. Waymo’s fleet has logged 170 million miles with 92% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers, and Uber is investing $1.25 billion in Rivian to deploy 50,000 robotaxis. Alphabet’s X spun out Anori with $26 million to untangle permitting for buildings and data centers. Jeff Bezos is raising $100 billion to buy manufacturing companies and automate them with AI, while Britain considers mandatory labels on AI-generated content. The fight for electrons is rewriting the map. China is helping Cuba capture solar energy as a US oil blockade creates the island’s worst energy crisis in decades, with Chinese-backed solar parks supplying about 10% of Cuba’s electricity. Jensen Huang, looking past terrestrial thermal limits, outlined Nvidia’s plans for data centers in space, noting that cooling via radiation just requires large surfaces, and quipping that “There’s a lot of space in space.”

We are editing life’s source code and preparing new worlds for it to run on. Cathy Tie launched Origin Genomics to advance precision germline gene correction and mitochondrial replacement therapy stateside. NASA revised its Artemis plans to give SpaceX’s Starship the role of propelling astronauts to lunar orbit, reducing Boeing to a supporting player as NASA targets a 2028 lunar return. Researchers proved that potatoes can grow in simulated lunar soil, vindicating Mark Watney, albeit with generous help from terrestrial compost.

The faster intelligence scales, the harder it gets to ignore the question of who scaled first. The White House has registered Aliens.gov amid its executive order to declassify UAP and NHI information, with the deputy press secretary replying with an alien emoji and the words “stay tuned.”

Intelligence that designs its own substrate has no natural predator, only natural questions.