Anthropic co-founder says the singularity is underway

PLUS: Try ChatGPT’s new voices with GPT-Live-1.1

Zach Mink

October 20, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to our 5,481 new readers. Anthropic has spent 2026 warning that AI is moving faster than anyone is ready for. Now one of its co-founders says the moment has a name.

Jack Clark just said that the singularity, when AI-driven progress starts outrunning humanity’s ability to keep up, is officially underway. What comes with it? A possible $44T U.S. economy, serious job disruption, and a short window to decide if AI needs an intelligence cap.

In today’s AI rundown:

Anthropic co-founder says the singularity is underway
One hacker’s AI agents break into 100+ companies
Try ChatGPT’s new voices with GPT-Live-1.1
Inception’s Mercury 3 speeds past rivals

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🌌 Anthropic co-founder says the singularity is underway

Image source: IMF

The Rundown: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark just told economists and policymakers at the IMF and World Bank’s annual meetings that the singularity, the point where AI speeds up discovery faster than humans can follow, has “now begun.”

The details:

Clark pointed to AI’s scores on Humanity’s Last Exam (expert-level questions) going from 8% to 67.7% since 2025, and FrontierMath improving from 2% to 94%.
One Anthropic model has U.S. GDP at $44T by 2030 if AI spreads fast, which Clark admitted sounds outlandish but also predicts “very disruptive” job impacts.
The world’s 10M scientists may soon direct “a billion virtual scientists,” Clark said while urging nations to build labs and robots before they run short.
He also said CEO Dario Amodei has floated limits on AI’s “ceiling of intelligence,” adding that he believes there is only “a small number of years” to act.

Why it matters: With the number of AI math and science breakthroughs in the last few months alone, 2026 has handed Clark plenty of evidence. Singularity talk used to live strictly in science fiction, and now one of the people building it is saying it out loud to the folks who run the global economy.

TOGETHER WITH ATLASSIAN

📈 AI adoption has outpaced strategy

The Rundown: Atlassian’s 2026 State of the Developer Experience report, based on global research with 1,560 respondents including devs and engineering leaders, maps out clear paths for leaders to help their teams manage the speed vs. friction tension happening right now.

In the report, you’ll explore how:

Devs are managing more output
An AI-native SDLC fixes bottlenecks
Only 23% of leaders have an AI strategy

Download the full State of DevEx 2026 Report today.

AI & SECURITY

🔓 One hacker’s AI agents break into 100+ companies

Image source: NorForge

The Rundown: Security firm NorForge revealed that a Chinese-speaking hacker let AI agents do nearly all the work to successfully break into the websites of 100+ companies, with Reuters identifying victims like Cummins, Deere, and SharkNinja in the hack.

The details:

NorForge watched the attacks after finding 20+ hacker control panels for Cairn, an open-source tool for AI agents, left online with no password.
The hacker fed the agents a pre-screened list of busy online stores and orders under 100 Chinese characters, then sent them after over 1,200 sites.
NorForge puts AI costs near $50 per successful break-in, with a typical one taking nearly a day using Claude Code and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.
It’s unclear if any data was taken, with SharkNinja calling the threat contained, Deere citing “remediation actions,” and Cummins “investigating.”

Why it matters: A month ago, we were writing about “three guys with Claude” breaking into OpenAI, and now it’s one hacker with an estimated $5K in tokens and a short note to their agents hitting 100+ companies. AI’s offensive cyber capabilities are outpacing the defensive ones, and a lot of companies are about to be caught in the crosshairs.

AI TRAINING

🎙️ Try ChatGPT’s new voices with GPT-Live-1.1

The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll try ChatGPT’s new voices, compare them with the same short passage, and check whether a spoken correction reaches the final answer.

Step-by-step:

Open ChatGPT’s Voice settings and choose Live where available. Pick a voice and start a new chat with the guide’s fictional workshop notice
Ask it to read the notice, then try the same words with another voice. Keep the language and instructions fixed so the comparison stays useful
Try a regional voice in a language you know well. Listen for clear names, dates, and numbers, and ask for a slower repeat when needed
Interrupt the notice with a new date and headcount. Check that those details change while the time and budget stay fixed
Ask Voice to search OpenAI’s release notes. Open its source link and check the answer rather than trusting the spoken search cue alone

Pro tip: A new voice and a new model are different changes. Comparing Bubbie with your usual voice does not prove a gain over GPT-Live-1. Pro members get the practice prompts and listening checklist.

PRESENTED BY OPTIMIZELY

🤖 Find high-value AI use cases

The Rundown: Most AI planning starts with the wrong question. Instead of asking “What should AI do?”, ask “Where does the work break?” Optimizely’s template helps you identify high-value AI use cases by finding the manual work slowing you down.

This template gives you:

A personalized AI use case in minutes
The same process that turned a 2-3 hour GA4 reporting task into a 5-minute one
A use case mapped to how your team actually works, not a generic list of ideas

Download the template.

INCEPTION

⚡️ Inception’s Mercury 3 speeds past rivals

Image source: Inception

The Rundown: AI startup Inception just launched Mercury 3, a “diffusion” language model it says matches or beats OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 by its own numbers at 4-8x their speed.

The details:

Language models write one at a time, while diffusion models draft many words at once and refine them, leading to outputs of 1,000+ tokens a second.
Inception pitches it as useful for apps where any lag shows, with early users running live tutors, voice customer support, and web-browsing agents on it.
Mercury 3 is priced at $0.20/$0.70 per million tokens, with the company saying the model is 40x the size of Mercury 1 while still maintaining the same speeds.
Co-founder Stefano Ermon said scaling diffusion is limited by “compute and data, not fundamental algorithmic barriers,” and a successor is already in training.

Why it matters: Mercury 3 won’t replace the frontier AI people use for hard reasoning, and Inception isn’t pretending it will. But with OpenAI’s Cerebras partnership and a new Ultrafast tier that pushes GPT-6 Astra as high as 300 tokens/s, speed is clearly the next battleground — and Inception is betting an alternative model type can win it.

QUICK HITS

COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY

▸ A reader built a voice-enabled task management system with Claude

Today’s workflow comes from an anonymous Rundown reader:

I’m 78, and I run a homestead, a home server, and a senior center, with dozens of jobs underway at once. Most jobs get done a piece at a time, while to-do apps only track whether something is “done” or “not done.”

So I built Taskmaster: a plain-text ledger inside a Claude Project. I first tried building a large custom app, then scrapped it. One of my own rules is, “Build the ugly version first.”

In the field, I speak notes into the Claude app on my phone. Claude saves my exact words, updates each job’s progress, and asks me one question at a time when something is unclear. When I ask, “What’s next?” it considers deadlines, weather, and my energy level, then gives me one to three things to do.

Anything tied to a specific time goes on my Google Calendar. Home Assistant then reads the reminder aloud through my hearing aids. Today, it checked the forecast and scheduled my paint job for the one day this week that stays above 50°F overnight. The machine carries the complexity, so I don’t have to.

See the workflow on our Community Workflow Hub →

What have you fixed or built with AI lately? Share your workflow, and you could be featured right here in The Rundown.

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📽️ FLUX 3 Max - Black Forest Labs’ fast text-to-video AI with voices and sound
💨 Mercury 3 - Inception’s speed-focused diffusion AI rivaling GPT-6 Luna
🔎 Exa 3.0 - Exa’s SOTA web search for AI agents

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📰 Everything else in AI today

CData’s Foundations for AI virtual event on Nov. 5 covers why agents need an AI Gateway to govern access and spending, and features insights from Anaqua’s CIO on rolling out AI. Register here.*

Elon Musk said he will give a SpaceX share to “every kid in America” starting next year via Trump Accounts, responding to the news of Anthropic’s Public Benefit Fund.

The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security formally banned DeepSeek from civilian agency systems, giving departments 60 days to request exceptions and extending the ban to third-party tools built on the Chinese lab’s models.

Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Max, a sped-up FLUX 3 built with fal that it says matches Seedance 2.5 on quality at 22x the speed, rendering 10s clips in 12 seconds.

Chinese AI lab MiniMax launched M3.1 Flash, a new model previously tested as “Space Bunny”, scoring well on coding and computer use at an extremely low price.

*Sponsored Listing