Welcome to May 22, 2026

The Singularity is now forecasting itself. On ForecastBench, an LLM has matched superforecaster performance for the first time, with Google DeepMind’s “green tree” claiming the top spot on the Forecasting Research Institute’s benchmark. Recursive self-improvement is no longer theoretical. Alibaba’s Qwen3.7-Max ran 35 hours of continuous autonomous execution, performing 432 kernel evaluations across 1,158 tool calls and delivering a 10x geometric mean speedup over the Triton reference. Even the benchmarks are getting audacious. A new OpenSCAD LLM benchmark asks frontier models to reconstruct the Pantheon from photos, with Gemini 3.5 Flash High autonomously winning the architecture contest two millennia after Hadrian.

The unknown is now an engineering problem. Following OpenAI’s disproof of Erdős’s unit distance conjecture, a GPT-5.5 counterexample is being proposed as “the flag of artificial intelligence.” Chemistry has joined the party. Kemira and CuspAI used generative AI to design materials that remove PFAS “forever chemicals” from water, exploring a 300-trillion-structure design space to deliver over 5,000 novel candidates. The skeptics will be predictable. As one observer noted, “One day AI will cure a disease. And many people will look you dead in the eye and say ‘the cure was already in the corpus of human knowledge.’”

The substrate is straining to keep up. Epoch AI found that high-bandwidth memory ballooned from 52% to 63% of total AI chip component spending in under two years. Anthropic is reportedly in talks with Microsoft to adopt Maia chips, signaling that everyone needs a second silicon source. Demand is so intense that AI is killing the cheap smartphone, with worldwide handset shipments projected to fall 13% in 2026 as memory gets vacuumed up by data centers. The White House is hedging across paradigms, awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing firms including IBM and Rigetti, with the government taking equity.

Embodied intelligence is reaching consumer scale. UBTECH unveiled Walker C1, a full-size humanoid built for “urban co-existence” that performs ballet and ballroom dances with a human partner. The factories to mass-produce these dancers are already humming. China’s EngineAI just activated its 10,000-unit humanoid production line in Shenzhen, with T800 units shipping. The economics are collapsing fast. Robot barbers in China are using 3D scanning and AI to give millimeter-precision haircuts for under a dollar, finally making the deflationary promise of automation tangible.

Biology is being rewritten too. Eli Lilly’s retatrutide trial showed weight loss matching gastric bypass surgery for the heaviest patients, while observers note that 28.3% bodyweight loss over 80 weeks with zero cardiac or liver signals positions retatrutide to become the best-selling drug of all time. De-extinction is creeping closer. Colossal Biosciences’ artificial egg, a silicone-membrane synthetic shell, just hatched 26 healthy chickens, a foundational step toward resurrecting the dodo and South Island giant moa.

The roadmap is expanding off-world. SpaceX’s Starlink team announced interplanetary roaming to deliver “Gigabit connectivity anywhere on the Moon,” a service ready before its first customers. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman expects China to perform a crewed flight around the Moon in 2027, booking the next space race. SpaceX just successfully launched Starship V3 on Starship’s twelfth overall flight test. The sky has too many cameras to stay classified. The Department of War’s second UAP release under the PURSUE program included the 40+ videos requested by Rep. Luna’s task force.

The economy is restructuring around its new factor of production. ClickUp cut 22% of headcount despite booming business, introducing $1 million salary bands for engineers who orchestrate agents rather than write code, calling itself a “100x org.” Legacy infrastructure is fighting a rearguard action. AT&T is suing California to escape a $1 billion annual mandate to maintain copper wires for the 3% of households still using them. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order telling California agencies to study subsidizing companies that retain employees rather than replace them, while the White House postponed its own AI executive order on pre-release model review after anti-doomer pushback. Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, when he told Grand Valley State graduates they all have “AI: actual intelligence.” Behind it all, OpenAI booked $5.7 billion in Q1 revenue, roughly $1 billion ahead of Anthropic, with Codex, B2B sales, and ChatGPT ads driving growth.

Any sufficiently advanced B2B SaaS is indistinguishable from magic.