Altman says humanity is ‘now in the singularity’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said humanity has entered the technological singularity, making the declaration on Saturday's episode of the "Relentless" podcast. "We are now, like, in the singularity — this is the moment," Altman said, adding that "ten years ago this was like a kind of far-off dream at best."x+1

The singularity is broadly defined as the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins advancing at a pace that becomes difficult to predict or control. Altman's remarks represent his most direct claim yet that this threshold has been crossed.

A Pattern of Escalating Claims

Altman has been building toward this declaration for over a year. In June 2025, he published a blog post titled "The Gentle Singularity," in which he argued that the singularity was not a future event but an unfolding reality. "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started," he wrote at the time. In that essay, he predicted that 2026 would bring systems capable of generating novel insights and that 2027 could see robots performing tasks in the physical world.facebook+2

In a September 2025 interview with German newspaper Die Welt, Altman predicted that AI would become "extraordinarily capable" by 2030 and said he could "easily imagine a world where 30 to 40 per cent of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future."indianexpress+1

Echoing Google DeepMind's Hassabis

Altman's latest statement follows similar language from Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 2.34% DeepMind, who declared at Google I/O in May that "we were standing in the foothills of the singularity." Hassabis said at the time that human-level artificial general intelligence could arrive by 2029 or 2030, and urged that "society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means."semafor+1

Skeptics Push Back

Not everyone shares this framing. Mashable noted in 2025 that "scientific evidence does not indicate that humanity is nearing the development of digital superintelligence." AI researchers have generally placed AGI timelines around 2040 in broader surveys, though estimates from industry leaders at companies like OpenAI and DeepMind have consistently been more aggressive.mashable+1

The convergence of language from the heads of the two leading AI labs — both now describing the present moment as the singularity or its immediate precursor — marks a notable shift in how the industry's most powerful figures are framing the current state of AI development.