Sam Altman Says Humanity Has Entered The Singularity 👀

Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,

In today's issue, a podcast interview where Sam Altman covers a wide range of topics, from startups and exponential trends to operating amid chaos, all while casually claiming humanity has already entered the singularity.

Let’s jump right in!

Read Time: 4.5’ min

Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI

• Chart of the week: Which Countries Are Using AI the Most?

• Claude Opus 5 Launches: Near-Fable Intelligence at Half the Price

• AI Findings/Resources

• AI tools to check out

• Video of the week

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Chart of the week

Which Countries Are Using AI the Most?

• While the U.S. remains at the forefront of building AI models, Europe and parts of Asia are leading in everyday AI usage.

• The UAE (70%) and Singapore (63%) lead the world in AI adoption, with far higher usage rates than larger economies such as the U.S. (31%), which ranks outside the global top 20.

Source

AI News

ANTHROPIC

Claude Opus 5 Launches: Near-Fable Intelligence at Half the Price

Anthropic has introduced Claude Opus 5, its newest flagship AI model, offering performance close to Fable 5 while being less restrictive and costing roughly half as much per token.

Details:

• Claude Opus 5 becomes Anthropic's most capable generally available model, delivering major improvements in coding, reasoning, scientific research, and agentic workflows while maintaining the same pricing as Opus 4.8.

• The model even outperforms Fable 5 on several benchmarks, including agentic coding and knowledge work, while posting a standout 30.2% score on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark that measures novel problem-solving.

• Anthropic says Opus 5 is better at checking and improving its own work, allowing it to iterate on solutions and even create its own software tools when existing ones are unavailable.

• The company also introduced Fast Mode, which delivers responses up to 2.5× faster for users who prioritize speed, while higher effort settings allow developers to trade cost for stronger reasoning performance.

• Opus 5 includes updated safety measures with significantly fewer cybersecurity filter interruptions than Fable 5.

Alongside Opus 5, Anthropic also introduced two new beta features: Mid-Conversation Tool Changes, which lets applications switch tools without resetting conversations, and Automatic Fallbacks, which makes API requests automatically route to the best available model by default rather than being blocked.

Source

AI Findings/Resources

🔍 Google's ATLAS: an expansive look at how people are using AI at work and in day-to-day life

🤯 Claude Opus 5 one-shotted this game

👉 The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 models

😅 Robot powered by Qualcomm’s new AI chip dies mid-presentation

😬 Extremely basic AI prompt cracks decades-old maths problem

AI Tools to check out

✅ OpenWorker: Open-source agent that doesn't just chat with you, but delivers finished work.

🦾 Workers Delos: Specialized AI workers for business. Real coworkers with their own email, phone number, and initiative.

👉 Animated Diagrams: Turn words into diagrams that move.

🗣 Diaform: AI forms that talk to your customers for you.

👀 Codey: Helps you build apps, run agents, automate workflows, and connect 70+ AI providers from one private workspace.

Video of the week

Sam Altman Says Humanity Has Entered The Singularity

Sam Altman covering his views on the evolution of startups, the impact of AI, and his leadership philosophy.

Building and running a startup

• Altman notes that AI has drastically accelerated what small teams can achieve compared to 10 years ago. He emphasizes that success today requires adapting to a world where AI is a first-class participant in productivity.

• He describes the importance of alignment with core suppliers, the role of corporate structures in human progress, and the necessity of making difficult choices, like shutting down promising projects such as Sora to focus on higher-priority goals like coding agent.

His perspective on the singularity:

• We are living in it: Altman notes that we have moved past the point of discussing the singularity as a mere theoretical topic at a lunch table; instead, we are now experiencing it in real-time as we transition into this new era.

• He views the current state as a continuous, rapid exponential curve. While there is no single "tipping point," he describes the present as a decisive, consequential period where the trajectory of the future can still be influenced.

• A central concern for Altman is ensuring that as we move through this phase, society prioritizes liberty over authoritarianism. He warns against the risk of consolidating power into a single, controlling model or entity, arguing that humanity should instead focus on empowering individuals and decentralizing the benefits of artificial intelligence.

Personal habits & leadership

The conversation touches on his intense communication habits (texting 300–400 people a day), his approach to risk, and his dedication to learning from his strengths rather than obsessing over weaknesses.

Altman also shares his framework for identifying enduring trends, emphasizing that a real trend is something people integrate into their daily lives rather than just a product that creates initial hype.

Watch the full interview

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Gina 👩🏻‍💻