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 the global economy” and that it’s spending its time imagining a “quadrillion-dollar world and to enumerate the relevant bottlenecks to bringing it about.”
Lord help us if the only marker of technological advancement is how much money Stripe is processing. Though, to be fair to the company, it’s not like it’s the first to use dollars as a singularity marker. The initial agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft on how to know if artificial general intelligence has been reached was when an AI system could generate at least $100 billion in profits.
We probably could have seen this coming from Stripe, too. Back in February, Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison said, “I think Q1 2026 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the Singularity.” So he was really teasing this reveal. He’s also not alone in dropping a pin in that time period. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed last month that, “We are now, like, in the singularity.” Elon Musk also said as much recently, but he also has made that claim several times this year alone and just kinda says shit.
It’s notable that the people claiming singularity status are either people with money riding on it or the people who move that money around. Surely there’s got to be a better way.
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