Welcome to May 13, 2026

The Singularity is the moment the test-taker becomes the test-maker. ProgramBench, an eval that measures whether language models can rebuild programs from scratch, just had its first task solved by both GPT 5.5 high and xhigh, which respectively chose C and Python, with xhigh dominating the broader benchmark. The new AI IQ meta-eval maps a calibrated mix of 12 existing benchmarks onto implied IQs and crowned GPT-5.5 the smartest available model with a score of 136, well past Mensa. Agents are learning to write their own marching orders too, with users now metaprompting Codex to draft its own “/goal,” and one calling the resulting stack “the highest leverage AI agent configuration available today.”

That leverage is being industrialized across every layer of the stack. Anthropic has launched “Claude for the legal industry,” shipping 20-plus MCP connectors that link Claude to the software the legal industry runs on, alongside 12 practice-area plugins, and partnering with the Free Law Project and the Justice Technology Association to put counsel within reach of people who currently cannot access it. Google is fusing intelligence into the OS layer with Gemini Intelligence, which lets users vibe-code their own Android widgets, plus a Gemini-powered mouse pointer that understands what it is pointing at, finally making the prompt a gesture rather than a paragraph. The chassis is being rebuilt to match. Google has unveiled the Googlebook, a Chromebook successor that merges ChromeOS and Android into a single Gemini-optimized OS, arriving this fall as Mountain View’s answer to Apple’s MacBook Neo.

Powering all this still takes raw megawatts. xAI has added 19 gas turbines to its second data center campus, Colossus 2, in Southaven, Mississippi over just the past two months, brute-forcing past the grid queue. Ames National Lab’s new DuctGPT is hunting for next-gen fusion alloys, compressing materials discovery from months to hours and aiming to one day trade those turbines for tame starfire. While compute keeps scaling on paper, its avatars are scaling actual walls. China’s RobotPlusPlus has debuted a humanoid special-ops robot on magnetic-adhesion wheels that scales vertical steel in chemical plants, shipyards, and energy facilities, swapping tools at the wrist for welding, flaw detection, rust removal, grinding, and spraying where humans dare not.

Intelligence is climbing into the body too. Columbia researchers demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system, reading high-resolution intracranial EEG to identify whichever voice you are focusing on in a noisy room and automatically amplify it while suppressing the others, finally solving the cocktail party problem that conventional hearing aids have ducked for decades. Isomorphic Labs just closed a $2.1B round led by Thrive to scale AI-driven drug discovery, pushing the next benchmark down to the molecular level.

The frontier is also racing skyward. SpaceX is now ~200 satellites away from having launched more than the rest of the world combined, despite giving everyone else a 61-year head start. Google is in talks with SpaceX for a rocket-launch deal as Google expands its own push to put data centers in orbit, fusing the search index with the sky itself. Starship Flight 12, debuting the V3 vehicle, is targeted for as early as May 19, while Musk confirms SpaceX is scouting new spaceports at home and abroad to keep cadence climbing. Ron Baron pegs the eventual valuation at $30 trillion within 10 to 15 years. Above all of this, Star Catcher just raised $65M to beam optical power tuned to off-the-shelf solar arrays, supercharging client satellites with 2 to 10x more power on demand, building the first true grid in orbit.

The sky is also starting to unseal its archives. Japan’s government says it is analyzing the Pentagon’s PURSUE-released UAP files with “great interest,” including videos shot near Japan, and will begin its own disclosure on a case-by-case basis. Rep. Tim Burchett, who championed PURSUE, replied with a single word: “Dominoes.”

Back on Earth, the economy is repricing intelligence in real time. Anthropic warned investors away from eight unauthorized secondary marketplaces, just as it is reportedly in talks to raise up to $50B at a $950B valuation. Trust is being revalued at Princeton too, which is ending its 1893 honor code by faculty vote, requiring proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer because AI has made it both easier for students to cheat and harder for instructors to spot. And in Hollywood, struggling screenwriters now call AI gig work “the new waiting tables,” signing on with platforms like Mercor to train the very models that will retire their craft.

All the world’s a training set, and all the men and women merely labels.