What If This Was How You Found Out The Singularity Has Begun?

It should not come as a surprise that some tech executive is trumpeting the singularity despite all evidence to the contrary. It should perhaps be a bit surprising that the claim is coming from payment processor Stripe. According to Axios, the company—which recently purchased AI marketplace OpenRouter—told shareholders that not only are we living in the singularity, but it actually started back in January. You might be wondering, on what basis does Stripe, a company that is basically just a middleman between businesses and finance networks, have to claim that artificial intelligence has surpassed human capabilities? The basis is that it feels like it’s true. In the shareholder letter obtained by Axios, Stripe explained, “It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis.” The lone meaningful piece of evidence that Stripe offers is the fact that there has been “a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation.” As for what the singularity will look like, the primary context for Stripe is (unsurprisingly) money. The company says there is “no ceiling on the size of t