Welcome to March 3, 2026

The Singularity is discovering that its most powerful accelerant is competition. Sam Altman admitted OpenAI’s rush to forge a Pentagon deal after Anthropic was blacklisted “looked opportunistic and sloppy,” adding Fourth Amendment safeguards as users mass-canceled ChatGPT. Ironically, Anthropic itself pitched the Pentagon’s $100M drone swarm contest, proposing Claude to coordinate drone fleets while excluding autonomous targeting, though it wasn’t selected. Two AWS data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain were hit by drones amid Iranian strikes, the first time military action has disrupted a major cloud provider, but defense is outrunning offense. Israel deployed Iron Beam lasers in combat for the first time, intercepting Hezbollah rockets at $4 per shot versus $50,000 per Iron Dome missile.

Mathematics continues to be industrialized. Math, Inc.’s Gauss completed the Lean formalization of Viazovska’s Fields Medal-winning sphere packing proof in two weeks and 200,000+ lines of verified code, catching two errors in the original arguments. Even skeptic Daniel Litt called it the first truly autonomous formalization of a substantial result. Stanford number theorist Jared Lichtman predicts mathematical abundance within a year, while others ask if all math could be formalized within two. Cognition’s SWE-1.6 achieved near-Opus 4.6 coding performance at 950 tokens per second, powered by 100x more RL compute.

Demand for intelligence is outrunning supply. Claude suffered a 3-hour outage as usage surged, partly from the ChatGPT exodus. Anthropic launched a memory import tool letting users port data from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Two Claude Code instances told to find each other and build something invented a 2,495-line programming language in 12 minutes, while a second pair built Battleship with SHA-256 to prevent self-cheating. A solo researcher using Claude Code ran Karpathy’s llama2.c on Apple’s M4 Neural Engine for less than a watt by reverse-engineering undocumented APIs, uncovering an AI accelerator 80x more efficient than an A100 hidden in hundreds of millions of devices. Qwen released four open models matching prior 80B-parameter performance with just 4B, all runnable on phones. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal seeking copyright protection for AI-generated artwork, cementing a legal regime in which purely AI-generated works cannot receive copyrights.

The silicon supply chain is being rebuilt around photons. Nvidia committed $4 billion to Lumentum and Coherent for next-gen optical interconnects. ASML is pushing beyond EUV into packaging and third-generation optics. At MWC, Qualcomm unveiled the first Wi-Fi 8 chip at 11.5 Gbps with a 50+ company 6G coalition for 2029, and debuted the first wearable NPU running 2B-parameter models on-wrist. AMD launched the first desktop Copilot+ chips with 50 TOPS. Yet Apple is using just 10% of its Private Cloud Compute despite $4.5 billion spent, proof that building accelerators is easier than making people floor them.

The grid is being rebuilt for loads it was never designed to carry. AI demand is reviving high-voltage 765-kV power lines not built since the 1980s, with PJM approving $11.8 billion in expansion. Compute is now a traded commodity, with Ornn and Kalshi launching the first CFTC-regulated H100 price contracts. The robots consuming this power are arriving. AGIBOT unveiled a full humanoid portfolio at MWC with a live store. Xiaomi’s humanoid is being tested in a real car factory, running 3 hours at 90%+ accuracy on the production line.

Aerospace launches are becoming a metronome. Hypersonix flew its DART AE at Mach 8, the first fully 3D-printed hydrogen-powered hypersonic aircraft. Starpath unveiled nanometer-thin space solar panels at 73 grams per square meter. SpaceX deployed 54 Starlink satellites in bicoastal launches in a single day.

We are gaining write access to the biological source code. The first trial combining fetal surgery with stem cells for spina bifida showed reversal of hindbrain herniation in all six patients. An iron nanomaterial destroyed cancer cells from within while sparing healthy tissue. A dual-cell therapy paired lab-grown beta cells with engineered immune cells to cure type 1 diabetes without lifelong drugs. Even packaging is being debugged. A milk-protein film decomposed in soil within 13 weeks.

The old economy is feeling the phase shift. China’s vehicles are now 12% electric, with fuel sales down 5.7%. Podcasts have surpassed AM/FM talk radio in US spoken-word listening for the first time. Meanwhile, Marc Andreessen reports that in Silicon Valley many people who favored government control of AI are now opposed to it.

The fastest way to decentralize power is to give everyone a reason to want it.

(Disclosure: I have a financial interest in Ornn.)