The Singularity Report
🚀 Gemini dominance, AI vending machines, Codex autonomous coding, and more
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
Google is making significant strides with Gemini rapidly becoming the preferred model for many developers. Harvey, the AI legal services company used by most top law firms, revealed Gemini is its best performing model. Avi Schiffmann, the CEO of friend.com, thinks: “Google just clearly has the best AI offering [right now]. Gemini is fantastic, and I actually trust Google’s infra. OpenAI is still a startup & Anthropic is nowhere to be seen. Why [you’d] go with any other closed source model is beyond me. Can’t believe we were all clowning on Google [before.]” Internally, we’re using Gemini more and more. Google’s signature conference I/O is this week, and they’re expected to release a bunch of new AI products and services.
How you use AI might depend on your age. Sam Altman highlighted the generational differences in how people use AI: “Older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement…[people in their 20s and 30s] use it as a life advisor…[and] don’t make a life decision without asking it what they should do and it has the full context on every person in their life…people in college use it as an operating system...they have complex ways to set it up to connect it to a bunch of files and they have fairly complex prompts memorized in their head.”
Can an AI make you money? A new paper explores the "Vending" benchmark, where AIs run simulated vending machine businesses. The takeaway: yes, AI can generate profit— but results were volatile, with failures often caused by unpredictable, complex edge cases.
The rest
Stripe co-founder John Collison says the company is preparing for an agent-driven commerce future. Today, you make purchases in your web browser and in the future those will be done on your behalf by an agent or in whichever tool you’re using. He says: “It’s kind of funny... an AI can do everything for you, but you still have to manually enter [your credit card] details. That is clearly not going to persist.”
Moderna has combined its CTO and head of HR roles into a single position, Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, and one of their responsibilities is determining which functions should be done by humans and which should be done by AI.
As users increasingly favor AI tools like ChatGPT over traditional Google searches, we’re thinking about how to “skate to where the puck is going.” It’s clear that search engine optimization (SEO) is losing relevance while AI answer engine optimization (AEO) is gaining relevance. We’re monitoring a few companies like Profound and now Athena who help companies with AEO. Here is the founder of Athena describing how to win in this future: “It’s an accumulation of a lot of things. It’s about making sure you have the right content targeting the right prompts people are searching on and on the right places on the internet the AI is pulling from.”
Sequoia Capital views AI as a “Trillion- Dollar” generational opportunity—far surpassing the cloud era—thanks to accelerating adoption and breakout use cases like coding and voice.
MasterClass, the company that offers video courses taught by experts and celebrities, is piloting OnCall, a feature that allows subscribers to have real-time conversations with AI replicas of their teachers.
Sharif Shameem, the Founder of Lexica, argues: “Friendly reminder that it’s very much possible to outperform frontier reasoning models like o3 on narrowly defined tasks for your product. You don’t have to be limited by o3 and Sonnet, you can make your product much better!”
Google launched AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-based coding agent, that helps researchers discover new algorithms for math and computer science problems. Google is already using it to improve data centers, design chips, and speed up Gemini model training. This is an early example of a recursive self improvement, where AI is used to accelerate the development of AI, compounding progress.
OpenAI launched Codex, an autonomous coding agent designed specifically for senior engineers, capable of building features and fixing bugs on its own. The early reviews are pretty strong. Together with their recent acquisition of Windsurf (the AI coding tool) and the release of coding-focused models, it’s clear they’re trying to have a really strong presence in software development.
OpenAI is preparing a new “Record” feature in ChatGPT — it will capture meetings, brainstorms, and thoughts using automatic transcription and smart summaries.
OpenAI continues to aspire to become an AI super app. In an interview at Sequoia AI Ascent, Sam Altman shared he expects ChatGPT to become a personal AI subscription—an assistant that remembers your life context and works seamlessly across tools, like an operating system for daily tasks.
Stats show ChatGPT now surpasses Wikipedia in monthly users.
OpenAI announces the “A to Z Challenge,” inviting users to apply GPT-4.1, o4-mini, or o3 models to uncover hidden archaeological sites in the Amazon.
The scale of OpenAI’s image generation launch was massive — at its peak, the product was onboarding a million users per hour.
A new study from Denmark suggests AI doesn’t automatically transform how people do work and approach their jobs—the impact depends on how organizations choose to implement and adapt to the technology.
OpenAI’s Deep Research feature now allows you to export the outputs to PDF.
Jobsy is an AI-powered job application tool that finds roles tailored to you—and applies on your behalf.
Granola, the AI notetaker company whose product I love, raised a $43M Series B and is adding collaboration tools so teams can share notes and let its AI surface smarter insights from shared context.
OpenMemory introduces a fully local, private memory system for MCP-compatible tools. It gives AI agents a shared, persistent context they can read from and write to—enabling memory across different assistants.
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!