contempt

The following fascinates me for its utter contempt for human imagination. At this stage that's all I want to say about it. A scifi dystopia where all resources are channelled into a vain attempt to produce an AI sufficiently intelligent that it can stop the attempt to build it. . . but it's easier to imagine the end of intelligent life than the end of the desire to be dominated.

Welcome to January 10, 2026

Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross Jan 11, 2026

The Singularity is starting to make the Manhattan Project look like a rounding error. In 2025, US AI infrastructure capex reached 1.9% of GDP, making the buildout more than three times larger than the Apollo Project (0.6%) and nearly five times larger than the Manhattan Project (0.4%). This investment is fueling a transition to recursive self-improvement. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark confirms they are seeing early signs of AI “getting better at doing components of AI research,” from kernel development to autonomous fine-tuning. The loop is nonetheless messy. xAI was reportedly using Claude via Cursor to build Grok until Anthropic cut off access, illustrating the incestuous velocity of the frontier.

The scale of these models is going vertical. Jensen Huang revealed Grok 5 will be a 7-trillion-parameter model. Meanwhile, China is racing the West. DeepSeek V4 is launching soon, with internal benchmarks reportedly showing it outperforms Claude and GPT in coding. Reasoning is also being solved. AxiomProver, an autonomous theorem prover, produced formal Lean proofs to solve 12 out of 12 Putnam 2025 competition problems, doing what human prodigies struggle to do, but nearly instantly. Meanwhile, the human-machine interface is evolving rapidly. ElevenLabs released Scribe v2, scoring a SOTA 95.7% on FLEURS and perfecting speech-to-text, while Google has begun officially discouraging website owners from “content chunking” to feed Gemini instead of human visitors.

The gigawatt is the new unit of compute. Epoch AI identifies Anthropic’s Project Rainier in Indiana as the world’s new largest data center at 750 MW, soon to pass 1 GW. To power this hunger, OpenAI and SoftBank are investing $1 billion into SB Energy for a massive US buildout. The grid is being privatized to bypass bureaucracy. Senator Cotton has introduced the DATA Act, allowing data center owners to build private power plants and grids outside of public utility regulations.

We are re-architecting the physics of thought to make use of this power. D-Wave is acquiring Quantum Circuits Inc. for $550 million to merge annealing and gate-model quantum computing. Intel is pushing the atomic limit, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirming 14A production for 2027 utilizing backside power delivery.

Orbit is the next server room. Paul Graham declares that orbital AI data centers are “inevitable” and will be “one of the biggest engineering projects of our era.” The logistics are aligning: the FCC has approved SpaceX’s plan to double the number of deployed Gen2 Starlink satellites to 15,000. On the ground, Starbase, Texas is creating its own police department, a template for extraterrestrial governance, while the Artemis II launch window for humans to circle the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years opens February 6 at 9:41pm ET.

Biology is being converted into context. The Arc Institute unveiled “Stack,” a virtual cell foundation model trained on 149 million cells that performs in-context learning of biology, simulating cellular responses to perturbations without fine-tuning. This marks the first demonstration of in-context task learning in cell models. Essentially, “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” is now playing out, again, in wetware. Drug discovery is accelerating by orders of magnitude. Chinese researchers introduced DrugCLIP, a contrastive learning framework that screens molecules 10 million times faster than traditional docking. Big Pharma is buying in. Eli Lilly signed a massive deal with Chai Discovery to design novel biologics.

Meatspace is being upgraded. The Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is using 1 million cubic yards of concrete to stabilize its autonomous underground tunnel system, making it possibly the largest active US infrastructure project. In an ironic reversal, Amazon is planning a 225,000 sq ft “big box” retail store in Chicago, effectively reinventing Target. Meanwhile, California is drowning in relief. For the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile is in drought. However, the wealthy are still exiting the chat. Sergey Brin is reportedly joining Larry Page in leaving California for Nevada to escape retroactive wealth taxes.

The weird edges of the future are coming into focus. In Venezuela, Maduro’s security guards who fought with U.S. troops are allegedly reporting symptoms consistent with directed energy weapons reminiscent of the “sonic shotguns” from Minority Report. Meanwhile, in Washington, lawmakers are pushing for immunity from espionage charges for sources to disclose UAP crash-retrieval locations in a classified setting.

The Manhattan Project may have split the atom, but the Singularity will decompile the stars.