Sam Altman publishes “The Gentle Singularity”
‘We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started’
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On June 10, 2025 Sam Altman published “The Gentle Singularity”, opening with ‘We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published June 10, 2025 on blog.samaltman.com
- Opening: ‘We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started’
- Timeline: 2025 agents doing real cognitive work; 2026 systems that figure out novel insights; 2027 robots doing real-world tasks
- ‘The 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before’; intelligence and energy become abundant
- Calls for solving alignment and making superintelligence cheap and widely available
What happened
Altman framed the arrival of superintelligence as already under way but socially gradual, and gave specific yearly predictions for 2025–2027.
Why it matters
Its 2026 prediction of AI systems producing novel insights is now checkable against the 2026 wave of AI mathematics and science results (for example the Navier–Stokes and open-problems claims). Altman returned to the theme in July 2026 (‘we are now, like, in the singularity’).
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 1 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Sam Altman: The Gentle Singularityblog.samaltman.com, official
Press
- Nieman Lab: Has the ‘gentle singularity’ already begun?niemanlab.org, press
- Forbes: Altman says AI has already gone past the event horizonforbes.com, press
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)