Welcome to March 25, 2026

The Singularity is being reorganized for maximum velocity. OpenAI has finished pretraining its next flagship model, codenamed “Spud,” and expects it to accelerate the economy within weeks. To clear the runway, the company is shutting down Sora, renaming its product org to “AGI Deployment,” and Sam Altman is handing off direct control of safety and security teams to focus on raising capital, supply chains, and building data centers at planetary scale. In a sign of OpenAI racing to become Anthropic faster than Anthropic can become OpenAI, the Sora shutdown is part of a broader pivot toward business and coding ahead of a potential IPO as early as Q4. The collateral damage is cinematic: Disney has ended its partnership with OpenAI, including plans for a $1 billion stake. Meanwhile, model compression is going vertical. Google Research introduced TurboQuant, quantizing the KV cache to just 3 bits without training or accuracy loss for up to 8x performance on H100 GPUs. Yann LeCun and colleagues unveiled LeWM, the first JEPA that trains stably end-to-end from raw pixels, planning up to 48x faster than foundation-model-based world models on a single GPU.

The labs are pointing their models at the hardest problems in science. The newly organized OpenAI Foundation, armed with $1 billion per year, is prioritizing AI to cure Alzheimer’s by mapping disease pathways and accelerating treatment personalization. MIT researchers showed that LLM agents can now autonomously execute high energy physics analysis pipelines, with Claude Code automating everything from event selection to paper drafting. The product layer is expanding in parallel. OpenAI is rolling out visual shopping in ChatGPT, letting users discover products by uploading images. Anthropic is introducing auto mode in Claude Code, where Claude makes permission decisions on your behalf with safeguards for longer agentic tasks. The agentic surface area is bleeding into unexpected places: people are now using Chipotle’s order bot for free coding assistance by saying they need help before they can eat their bowl.

The silicon layer is being redesigned from the instruction set up. Arm unveiled its debut “AGI CPU,” a dramatic departure from its role as a neutral IP licensor, claiming twice the efficiency of x86 on the most demanding AI workloads. Meta is the lead partner, co-developing the chip for gigawatt-scale infrastructure alongside its custom MTIA accelerators, with Cerebras, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and others as launch partners. Arm is betting big, projecting $25 billion in revenue by 2031 with $15 billion from AGI CPU sales alone, versus just $4 billion in 2025.

The physical plant of intelligence keeps expanding. Microsoft has agreed to rent a 700-megawatt Texas data center originally developed for Oracle and OpenAI, adjacent to the Stargate campus. Crusoe and Redwood Materials are scaling their renewable-powered compute partnership to nearly 7x the original deployment in Nevada. In a prelude to Star Trek, CERN has transported antimatter for the first time, ferrying 92 antiprotons in a magnetic bottle on the back of a truck outside Geneva. Not all hardware is crossing borders smoothly, however: Meta’s new display-equipped Ray-Ban glasses are being withheld from the EU over AI regulations.

Robots are entering the consumer era. Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics, a startup building a 42-inch humanoid that can walk, grip items, and dance. Germany’s Agile Robots and Google DeepMind have partnered to integrate Gemini Robotics models into 20,000 installed solutions worldwide. AI is also learning to read the earth itself, with researchers using radar imagery to spot communities at imminent landslide risk, crunching data sensitive to millimeters of annual change.

The orbital economy is accelerating toward escape velocity. SpaceX is aiming to file its IPO prospectus as soon as this week, potentially raising more than $75 billion. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman declared that America will “never give up the Moon again,” announcing near-monthly lunar equipment landings starting in 2027, MoonFall drones, and crewed surface missions every six months. Observers helpfully note that planned lunar mass drivers will double as superweapons, since 1 kg of moon rock carries the kinetic energy of 15 kg of TNT on reentry. Fittingly, For All Mankind has been renewed for a sixth and final season, just as reality catches up to its fictional alternative timeline.

The capital stack is matching the ambition. OpenAI is raising an additional $10 billion, bringing its record funding round to $120 billion. The regulatory layer is crystallizing too: the newest Clarity Act language would ban yield payments for simply holding a stablecoin, granting rewards only narrowly. Meanwhile, squirrels in London parks are vaping e-cigarettes.

When even the squirrels are self-modifying, the takeoff is underway.