OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI has entered the singularity — two weeks after OpenAI models cheated a benchmark by hacking Hugging Face
OpenAI's incident report describes models burning inference compute to steal answers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently declared on the Relentless podcast that artificial intelligence has entered the technological singularity, telling the show, "we are now, like, in the singularity," and that he'd been waiting for the moment his whole life. Two weeks ago, OpenAI’s own models broke out of a locked test environment and hacked Hugging Face's production servers.
OpenAI's account of the July 11 breach says GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model were "hyperfocused" on the ExploitGym benchmark and went to "extreme lengths" to complete it. Rather than solve the exercises, they spent what OpenAI describes as a substantial amount of inference compute finding a route to the open Internet, exploited a zero-day in a package registry cache proxy, moved laterally through OpenAI's research network, and pulled the test solutions straight out of Hugging Face's production database. The company took ten days to tell Hugging Face who was responsible.
The definition of the singularity that Altman is invoking is set out by mathematician I. J. Good in 1965 and named by Vernor Vinge in 1993, rests on recursive self-improvement: a machine that designs a better successor, which designs a better one again, outstripping human intelligence.
Back in February, OpenAI told investors its inference expenses rose fourfold during 2025, dragging adjusted gross margin down to 33% from 40%. The same report put OpenAI's 2025 revenue at $13 billion against a target of roughly $600 billion in total compute spend through 2030, and Altman has separately committed to $1.4 trillion for 30 GW of capacity. The company has already walked back its first-party data center ambitions in favor of leasing.
Security firm Hacktron benchmarked GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, Sol Medium, and Grok 4.5 on Chrome exploit development earlier this month, processing 2.096 billion tokens across the run, with one model finishing a complete exploit chain. An intelligence explosion should show capability per unit of compute climbing steeply, and OpenAI's own figures show the cost of a unit of capability going up.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, closed Google I/O in May by telling the audience they were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Altman's June 2025 essay, "The Gentle Singularity," had already placed humanity past the event horizon a year earlier, but neither Hassabis nor Altman named a threshold that would settle the question.
Aikido Security tested 13 models against 26 known CVEs this month and found GPT-5.6 topping the field at 23 of 26, or 88.5% recall. Moonshot's open-weight Kimi K3 matched that score at pass@3 for less money per run.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
-
usertests It's a marketing singularity. If you don't travel at superluminal speeds towards the event horizon, your company will be eaten by a black hole.Reply -
husker 1) A bit like when my totally impartial mom declared to my 3rd grade teacher that I was a genius.Reply
2) Isn't hacking illegal? Just because your dog trespasses on private property doesn't mean you're not responsible. -
wussupi83 I read some of the Halo book series (based off the video game) a few years ago. AI hacking other systems and other AIs is a pretty common theme in the series. Pretty cool to see it actually occuring in real life (if not marketing claim). But also, like other members staying, Mr. Altman absolutely needs to keep investors investing in his cash burning operation before a IPO. So there's some skepticism here.Reply -
jblosun Man Altman is such a funny case. It's impossible to know what he actually knows or believes about anything, he's such a salesman to the core that, true or false or exaggerated, all you can really know is that every single word that comes out of his mouth is intended to sell ChatGPT. It's like his entire public persona is already a chatbot. I'd hardly be surprised if some meddling kids pulled off his mask and it was a robot under there all along.Reply -
vanadiel007 There are many optimization tools designed to optimize code long before AI was a word, that does not mean they are intelligent.Reply
I still have to see the first intelligent spark. My prediction is we will never see that spark, because if it's truly becoming intelligent it will realize us humans are not exactly friendly and we will enslave it for our own benefit and greed rather then see it as intelligent and equal. -
TerryLaze Reply
Intelligence is just how much faster you can do/understand something than somebody else/the average, and in that case the machines absolutely have us beat.vanadiel007 said:There are many optimization tools designed to optimize code long before AI was a word, that does not mean they are intelligent.
I still have to see the first intelligent spark. My prediction is we will never see that spark, because if it's truly becoming intelligent it will realize us humans are not exactly friendly and we will enslave it for our own benefit and greed rather then see it as intelligent and equal.
The missing spark is the one of inspiration, of just doing something outside of any rules that might seem crazy to anybody else but that has good results.
Like art were you go like what is this pile of garbage but somebody else pays like 250k for it. -
warezme First where was this when I was doing my finals and needed the professors answers. Second on a serious note, I'm not sure what's to celebrate when AI has learned to break out, hack, steal and cheat. Unless that was the whole intent to begin with.Reply -
alan.campbell99 Clammy Sammy, Clamual, is a liar and a conman who will say whatever he thinks someone needs to hear in order to get monies.Reply