In January 2025, Sam Altman had posted a cryptic six-word post on X. “Near the singularity, unclear which side,” he’d then said. 18 months later, he believes that humanity is right in throes of the singularity.
Speaking on a recent podcast, the OpenAI CEO dropped the hedging altogether. “This is the most interesting, important thing I can imagine doing, and we are now like in the singularity,” he said. “This is the moment.” He went on to describe how a decade ago, this was still speculative territory, something reserved for late-night conversations rather than boardroom strategy. “It seemed very improbable. And now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not serious way.”
Altman framed his own motivation in almost personal terms. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s gonna be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world,” he said, adding that he was excited to get to work on it. But the comments weren’t purely celebratory. He also took a swipe at rival labs, saying some of the alternative visions being painted by other AI companies are “quite terrifying,” and that he intends to push back against them.
Where the conversation got more interesting was in how Altman qualified the singularity itself. He resisted the idea of a single tipping point, describing it instead as one continuous exponential curve. “I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential and any one moment is not like the tipping point,” he said, “and also that we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another, like it was when we started 10 years ago.”
A Year Of Escalating Claims
Altman’s remarks arrive as the tail end of a string of similar declarations from the industry’s most senior voices, each pinning the moment down a little more specifically than the last. His own January 2025 post was arguably where this round of speculation started. A year later, almost to the day, Elon Musk declared outright that “we have entered the singularity,” dropping the ambiguity Altman had left in his original post. Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison followed in February, suggesting Q1 2026 might eventually be remembered as the opening quarter of the singularity. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, back at his desk after years away, said around the same period that humanity appeared to be approaching it. OpenAI’s own VP of Research, Aidan Clark, hinted in March that some form of AGI may have already arrived, while President Greg Brockman said the company has “line of sight” to it. Marc Andreessen went further still, claiming in May this year that the threshold was crossed roughly three months ago with the latest frontier models. Demis Hassabis too added his own version of the claim in May, predicting that 2026 will eventually be seen as the beginning of the singularity, framed less as a prediction and more as a description of a feeling — the sense of months of work compressing into hours, spreading from research labs into everyday developer workflows. And eighteen months ago, Altman wasn’t sure which side of the singularity he was standing on. He now seems fairly certain he’s standing inside it.