The Singularity Report
AI geopolitics, data centers, the environment, and using AI at work
Every week I summarize the most interesting things happening in AI, in 5 minutes or less. Follow @tjhoyos on X/Twitter and subscribe to get this in your inbox every week!
Three big things
AI and domestic public policy. My goodness it’s hard to describe how ridiculous this is: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduce a bill to halt or restrict new data centers. I really hope AI isn’t politicized in a partisan way where you have one party for it and one party against it.
AI, data centers and the environment.
This defense of AI data centers is going viral. The meta point is that while questions around energy and resource allocation are totally fair game, the broader backlash feels disproportionate to the actual risks and downsides involved.
Especially because new analyses show “AI data center growth is not correlated with electricity price changes.” This whole thread is instructive.
Some people think data centers can actually lower electricity prices, as the study in the link shows a data center in San Antonio would generate $100M+ in incremental revenue while lowering costs by 4%.
38% of US citizens live within 5 miles of an operational data center.
Data centers that use closed loop cooling systems and modern wind turbines (like those from Boom Supersonic), don’t really need water.
Almond farming uses 16x as much water as data centers as of 2024.
US vs. China. AI is an important piece of the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China. Last week, several prominent AI and tech executives joined US officials in visiting China to discuss ways to reduce tensions and expand trade between the countries. During the visit, OpenAI published a report supporting a global governance framework for AI with input from the US and China. However, a blog post from Anthropic took a much harder line, arguing that it would be bad for the world if the global AI leader is an “authoritarian” government (they explicitly named the CCP), export controls are working, and the US should try to make sure China doesn’t catch up. Bill Gurley banged his usual open source drum while discussing China: he thinks that if the US doesn’t release a credible open source model and ecosystem, countries around the world could consolidate around Chinese-developed open models and standards by default; this is basically the opposite of the internet era, where the West built open platforms and standards while China built a closed domestic stack and the “Great Firewall.”
The rest
How the creator of OpenClaw uses agents at work. You’re probably not using AI enough at work…
Even at seemingly absurd valuations, with Anthropic reportedly trading at over a $1T private market valuation (and as high as $1.4T at one point), AI labs may still be undervalued. That’s because inference (or intelligence on demand) could ultimately become one of the largest markets the world has ever seen, particularly as usage moves towards agents that think, reason, use tools, respond, and take action.
Interesting story from Jeff Bezos illustrating how a lack of imagination is sometimes what gets in the way of believing AI will create jobs: “[if you tried to explain modern jobs to farmers a century ago] they would not have believed you…Forget massage therapist, there are dog psychiatrists.”
This new piece of AI hardware for book readers is super cool. Mark II is an AI-powered bookmark that has a built in digital highlighter that makes it easy to capture quotes and record your own ideas with voice-to-text as you’re reading.
Interesting piece from A16Z’s Olivia Moore on how tools like codex are expanding from coding into everyday knowledge work.
Relatedly, OpenAI is testing integrating its two flagship products as Codex is being rolled out inside the ChatGPT mobile app for some users. I think this will be a force amplifier for the adoption of their coding agents as they have such a large installed base, and this should make managing agents via mobile devices a lot easier.
Cool breakdown from CEO Tyler Denk on how newsletter platform Beehiiv is using AI internally including tools and workflows. Similar to the ‘company brains’ we discussed here a couple weeks back he says: “the best decision I made this year was to connect my entire business to claude”
Impressive: Thinking Machines, the AI lab from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released their first products, and they look very cool. The thing that stood out to me the most was the fast, real-time voice and context-aware (i.e., it can see your screen) AI they released. They’re trying to expand beyond chatbots with “interaction models” that don’t just do turn-based prompts (where users volley between questions and responses, waiting each time), but actually do real-time collaboration. The demo they put together is very compelling where the models continuously observe, respond (quickly), reason, and use tools in parallel. Check out the videos in the links.
Similarly, Google DeepMind is also exploring how AI can transform computer interfaces. They’re testing new interactions like turning the cursor into a context-aware assistant that understands what users are pointing at in real-time. Instead of manually switching between apps or writing detailed prompts, users can interact through natural gestures, speech, and lightweight instructions.
Recent productivity data (utilization-adjusted total factor productivity) do not show that AI is creating enormous leverage in the economy.
Google is planning to work with SpaceX on space-based data centers. Interesting to see the various alliances between SpaceX, Anthropic, Tesla, Google, and Cursor.
TrueShort, the modern entertainment studio which uses AI to make engaging short films that are exploding in popularity, raised $12M.
Great interview with the Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao on Invest Like the Best. Some interesting stats: “NDR is over 500% on an annualized basis…Anthropic’s first dollar of revenue came in March of 2023…Over 90% of code inside Anthropic is written by Claude Code…The head of tax is the heaviest token user inside the company…Run rate revenue went from $9B to $30B in one quarter (reportedly, on pace for $50B by end of next month)…Cowork is growing faster than Claude Code did at the same point in its life”
Google is reportedly expanding hiring for “Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)” roles, and plans to bring in hundreds of engineers to help customers adopt its AI systems.
Box CEO Aaron Levie on forward-deployed engineering: “I’m fully forward deployed engineering pilled specifically because AI simply is not the same as software. In software, you deliver a stable piece of technology to a customer and they adopt it…In AI, you’re delivering something that is constantly evolving both due to the nature of the new capabilities and best practices that emerge, but also because the underlying models change so much that they can meaningfully change the workflow as a result of their upgrades. As we go from chat systems to anyone can relatively easily adopt to agentic systems that require more meaningful efforts to manage and update, the FDE model (or equivalent) essentially becomes a core competency for anyone deploying AI at scale.”
Apparently Google’s yet unreleased Gemini 3.2 Flash model will be near frontier-level performance but 10-20x cheaper. Excited to see what they’ve come up with when it’s released.
AI chip and inference company Cerebras went public and the stock price surged post-IPO. The current market cap is $64B.
Unsurprising: freelance platform Upwork says AI is cannibalizing demand for lower-value freelance work, particularly projects priced under $500, while AI-related work was up 40% YoY.
Bill Ackman lays out his investment thesis for Microsoft.
The US and China view AI very differently. Here is an ABC reporter: “I asked a 12-year-old in Beijing if AI scares her. Her answer: ‘If I use AI, then I will be the scary person.’ While American parents debate whether kids should use AI at school, China has made it mandatory and is rushing to embed AI across society”
Post from Dwarkesh Patel on the downstream effects of intelligence-on-demand and “the mistake of conflating intelligence and power…individual IQ is only modestly correlated with individual income, but national IQ is strongly correlated with national outcomes. This is because intelligence has a lot of spillover effects - smarter societies cooperate more, save more, and can coordinate to build things like space shuttles and semiconductors. Richard Trevithick, who invented the high-pressure steam engine, died in poverty, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. But the fact that 18th and 19th century Britain had lots and lots of people like Trevithick contributed to Britain being able to set up a global empire...It seems to me that the right mental model is that automated firms will outcompete everyone else in normal capitalist ways, rather than a single AI outthinking everyone else.”
Great read titled AI’s Public Perception Problem.
Luel raised a $31M seed round to help AI labs source human-generated data. Very weird and interesting behavior: normal people recording themselves doing tasks and selling that to labs to train on.
Codex-native apps are popping up.
OpenAI launched new personal finance features that make it easy to connect your data (think bank accounts, credit cards, etc.) and analyze it in ChatGPT.
A thread with open source alternatives to AI transcription tools like WisprFlow (and AI notetakers like Granola).
OpenAI launched a new effort for using AI to help stave off cyber attacks. Anecdotally, it is truly insane how many large scale public hacks and security vulnerabilities have come about recently.
Every week I summarize the most interesting things happening in AI, in 5 minutes or less. Follow @tjhoyos on X/Twitter and subscribe to get this in your inbox every week!