TRACKING THE SINGULARITY: JUNE 1ST
A $250B “AI” Foundation, Opus 4.8, AGI, the Quantum Foundary… the Singularity Sprints Forward
TLDR: This week on Moonshots we covered 8 stories shaping our exponential future: Anthropic reclaiming the AI crown, Demis Hassabis aligning his AGI timeline with Ray Kurzweil, Amazon turning AI shopping into a platform play, the OpenAI Foundation becoming the largest philanthropic entity on Earth, a $2 billion quantum chip foundry, wind and solar overtaking natural gas globally, a pocket-sized cancer detector out of China, and the humanoid robot race heating up between Figure and Tesla. If you missed the episode or want a refresher on the key points, here you go. Let’s jump in…
ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE
Anthropic Drops Opus 4.8, Reclaims the Coding Crown
Just six weeks after Opus 4.7, Anthropic fired back at OpenAI with Opus 4.8. If you remember last episode, GPT 5.5 had run away with the coding benchmarks. Not anymore.
Benchmark blitz: Opus 4.8 now leads the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, a full 1.2 points ahead of GPT 5.5. On SWE-Bench Pro, it scored 69.2 versus 58.6. It’s also the only model to complete every case end-to-end on Anthropic’s Super Agent benchmark.
“We’re in the monthly update regime of the rat race, probably soon to be weekly, then daily, then hourly when we finally reach the singularity of the singularity.”
— Alex Wissner-Gross, PhD
Demis Hassabis Tightens His AGI Timeline to 2029
Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel laureate, just aligned his AGI prediction with our friend Ray Kurzweil’s original 2029 projection. He called today’s AI agents “a practice run” and warned that society has “only a few years to prepare for what’s coming.”
The Einstein test: Hassabis proposed a new AGI benchmark: take a model trained only on knowledge through 1901 and see if it can independently derive special relativity. Current systems can’t do it.
Alex’s pushback: “We’ve arguably had some form of artificial general intelligence since 2020. Generality was achieved with large language models and few-shot learners. Whether you think it happened in 2020 or 2029, with the benefit of hindsight a few decades from now, it all happened in one abbreviated historic period.”
Benchmark saturation: All frontier models are scoring within a tight band because the benchmarks themselves are saturating. Alex’s call: “We need a new set of benchmarks that capture scientific and engineering unsolved problems.”
“We’re going to keep moving the goalposts on AGI. And then we’re going to go, oh, AGI? Sentience. That’s what’s going to happen.”
— Dave Blundin
ECONOMY
Amazon’s AI Shopping Assistant: 3.5x Conversion Rate
Amazon’s voice AI shopping assistant, running on Alexa, is converting shoppers at 3.5 times the rate of traditional keyword search. Now Amazon is making it available to all retailers, turning their competitive advantage into an AWS-style platform play.
The irony: Alex pointed out that Amazon tried embedding shopping in Alexa smart speakers years ago and it flopped. Now they’ve done the opposite, embedding Alexa’s conversational agent inside the marketplace, and it works. Better late than never.
Amazon vs. Google: Peter outlined the difference between Amazon and Google’s I/O e-commerce announcement. Amazon’s play is vertical: own the customer relationship. Google’s play is horizontal: build open protocols (Universal Commerce Protocol, Agent Payment Protocol) so any AI agent can interact with any merchant. Both are trying to make traditional e-commerce websites irrelevant.
What’s next: Your personal AI will know what you need before you do. Hyper-personalization, anticipatory commerce, agents negotiating with agents. As Salim put it: “The retail war is no longer about shelf space. It’s about agent preferences.”
The OpenAI Foundation Is Now the Largest in the World ($250B)
After OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation, the OpenAI Foundation now owns 25% of the company. At current valuations, that puts the foundation somewhere between $130 billion and $260 billion, making it the largest philanthropic entity on Earth. For context: the Novo Nordisk Foundation is $150 billion, Tata Trust is $100 billion, and the Gates Foundation is $75 billion.
Latest grant: A $250 million investment in “economic futures,” funding research on public wealth funds, worker ownership models, and AI dividends. This comes right before a potential IPO.
The UBI debate: Alex raised a sharp point: if frontier labs converge toward dominating the global economy, there will be “irresistible pressure” for their foundation arms to support universal basic income or services. The 25% nonprofit stake starts to look like a built-in social safety net.
Not socialism: Salim pushed back hard on the framing: “A lot of people conflate UBI as socialism. It is not. It is libertarianism. You actually dismantle government services if you do this properly.” When algorithms efficiently match supply and demand, you get the benefits of shared resources without centralized corruption.
“There should be a thousand times more ideas flooding into Brett Taylor’s office at the OpenAI Foundation. There’s so much abundance to go around. It’s a call to arms.”
— Dave Blundin
QUANTUM
IBM and the US Government Bet $2 Billion on Quantum Chips
The Department of Commerce and IBM announced Anduron, America’s first purpose-built quantum chip foundry. A billion dollars from the CHIPS Act, a billion from IBM, built in Albany, New York on a 300mm manufacturing process that can produce quantum devices 30 times faster than current methods.
TSMC of quantum: The foundry model means IBM becomes the contract manufacturer for quantum. Google, IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave could potentially fab their quantum devices on Anduron, just like Apple and Nvidia use TSMC for classical chips.
Alex’s take: “Even though I’d normally complain about quantum computing being a solution in search of a problem, this is actually a smart bet. By the time this foundry is ready in the late 2020s, we’ll likely have quantum-accelerated AI advances. We want those superconducting qubits manufactured here in the US, not in Taiwan.”
The bigger picture: Salim noted that we still need roughly a thousand physical qubits per logical qubit. But if you drop the cost of fabrication by 30x, you can flood the system with physical qubits and brute-force your way to useful quantum computing.
ENERGY
Wind and Solar Surpass Natural Gas Globally
For the first time ever, wind and solar generated more electricity worldwide than natural gas. In April 2026, renewables hit 22% of global electricity at nearly 530 terawatt-hours, surpassing natural gas at 20%. China grew by 14%, the EU by 13%, and the UK by a staggering 35%.
The exponential curve: Solar has been doubling every 22 months for 40 years. This is not new. As Salim reminded us: “People can’t get their head around the fact that solar is on an exponential curve. Yes, we’re reaching the end of silicon-based panels. But now we have perovskite. And then something else. The curve keeps hopping up.”
Dave’s t-shirt: “Wind has blown through coal. Solar outshines gas.” Someone make that shirt please!
“The Earth is bathed in 8,000x more energy from the Sun than we consume as a species. There is plenty of energy, it’s just not in a usable form. Technology is the force that converts scarcity into abundance over and over again! As Elon keeps saying, we just need to keep tiling the planet in solar. The math works.”
— Peter Diamandis
ROBOTICS
The Humanoid Robot Race Heats Up
The competition between Figure, Tesla Optimus, and others continues to accelerate. We’re seeing rapid improvements in dexterity, navigation, and the ability to perform useful work in unstructured environments. This is the decade where humanoid robots go from lab demos to factory floors to, eventually, your home. The cost curves are following the same exponential patterns we’ve seen in every other information technology.
HERE’S THE BOTTOM LINE...
The pattern this week is unmistakable: the gaps between announcements are compressing. Six weeks between Opus 4.7 and 4.8. Monthly model releases becoming the norm. The world’s largest foundation materializing almost overnight. Quantum going from lab curiosity to industrial foundry. Solar crossing natural gas globally. A cancer detector shrinking to fit in your pocket.
As Dave said on the pod, we keep setting benchmarks and then blowing past them before we’ve had time to process the last one. That’s what the approach to the singularity feels like. Not one big moment, but a relentless acceleration where each week’s news would have been a year’s worth of progress a decade ago.
Pay attention. Stay optimistic. Build something.
Listen to this week’s full Moonshots episode wherever you get your podcasts.
If you’re interested in joining me and an extraordinary group of entrepreneurs, scientists, and technologists at the next Moonshots Gathering, head to moonshots.com for details.
See you next week,
Peter
This Week’s Moonshots Links
AI
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/26/deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-agentic-shopping-assistant-retailers
https://openaifoundation.org/news/economic-futures-in-the-age-of-ai
CHIPS & ENERGY
https://futurumgroup.com/insights/2-billion-chips-act-investment-in-quantum-bets-on-ibms-300mm-superconducting-silicon/
https://electrek.co/2026/05/20/in-a-first-wind-solar-generated-more-power-than-gas-globally-april-2026/
ECONOMY
https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/technology/newsom-ai-executive-order-california.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-apple-ai-graduation-speech-2026-5
BIOTECH
https://interestingengineering.com/science/new-device-detects-early-stage-cancer
ROBOTICS
https://a16z.com/america-cannot-lose-the-robotics-race/
https://www.threads.com/@em3rging/post/DYkhrsvCX9r
More From Peter
If you’ve enjoyed Metatrends, here are more ways to stay connected:
My suggestion centers on Dave Blundin’s point about the abundance of available solar energy — specifically, how much of it remains untapped in our cities and towns.
Currently, commercial-scale solar installations are largely confined to remote land acquired by energy companies, or to private rooftops and buildings where the power serves individual consumption.
However, we are overlooking two vast public domains that receive intense, consistent sunshine yet remain virtually unused for energy generation: our public roads and national highways, and the hundreds of thousands of miles of railway tracks. These linear corridors span every city and town, already cleared and maintained, and could host integrated solar surfaces or overhead canopies without consuming additional land. Tapping them would turn passive infrastructure into active energy assets, delivering truly public solar abundance at grid scale.
UBI is socialism unless we put guardrails in place so it doesn’t turn into a SNAP program. We must teach those who will need UBI to fish (learn a new skill, etc.) or they will be dependent upon the program, which is not Liberalism. Tony Robbins says people must have a purpose, we need to allow for that to happen.