"Welcome to May 22, 2026" — The Innermost Loop

Why this is in the vault

Daily Wissner-Gross digest organized around a single thesis: the Singularity is now forecasting itself. Hard signals worth filing: (1) an LLM ("green tree," Google DeepMind) matched superforecaster performance on ForecastBench for the first time, (2) Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max ran 35 hours of continuous autonomous execution with 1,158 tool calls for a 10x geometric-mean kernel speedup over Triton reference — a hard recursive-self-improvement datapoint, (3) HBM jumped from 52% to 63% of AI chip component spending in under two years per Epoch AI, (4) Anthropic reportedly in talks with Microsoft to adopt Maia chips (second-source signal), (5) AI demand is now cannibalizing cheap smartphones (worldwide handset shipments projected -13% in 2026 as memory gets vacuumed up by data centers), (6) ClickUp introduced $1M salary bands for engineers who orchestrate agents instead of writing code while cutting 22% of headcount, calling itself a "100x org," and (7) OpenAI Q1 revenue $5.7B (~$1B ahead of Anthropic). Retatrutide also surfaces with a 28.3% bodyweight loss / 80-week trial result with no cardiac or liver signals — directly relevant to the founder's tracked health context.

Bias / sponsorship check

No paid sponsors. Two standard "Subscribe for free" CTAs. Closing aphorism: "Any sufficiently advanced B2B SaaS is indistinguishable from magic." No self-promo of Solve Everything. Tone is the usual dry-satirical pro-acceleration framing.

Core argument

A single-day sweep daisy-chained around the claim that the Singularity is now forecasting itself, building its own substrate, and restructuring the economy that hosts it — i.e. capability, compute, and labor are all moving simultaneously on a calendar measured in weeks.

Forecasting and reasoning capability crossed thresholds. Google DeepMind's "green tree" took the top spot on the Forecasting Research Institute's ForecastBench, matching superforecaster performance for the first time — "recursive self-improvement is no longer theoretical." Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max ran 35 hours of continuous autonomous execution, performing 432 kernel evaluations across 1,158 tool calls and delivering a 10x geometric-mean speedup over the Triton reference. A new OpenSCAD LLM benchmark asks frontier models to reconstruct the Pantheon from photos; Gemini 3.5 Flash High won the architecture contest "two millennia after Hadrian." Following OpenAI's Erdős disproof, a GPT-5.5 counterexample is being framed as "the flag of artificial intelligence."

Generative chemistry and matter. Kemira and CuspAI used generative AI to design PFAS-removing materials, exploring a 300-trillion-structure design space and delivering 5,000+ novel candidates. Wissner-Gross flags the predictable skeptic move: "One day AI will cure a disease. And many people will look you dead in the eye and say 'the cure was already in the corpus of human knowledge.'"

The substrate is straining to keep up. Epoch AI: HBM share of AI chip component spending jumped from 52% to 63% in under two years. Anthropic reportedly in talks with Microsoft to adopt Maia chips — "everyone needs a second silicon source." Worldwide smartphone shipments projected -13% in 2026 as memory gets vacuumed up by data centers — "AI is killing the cheap smartphone." White House awarded $2B in grants to nine quantum-computing firms (IBM, Rigetti among them) with the government taking equity — paradigm hedge across classical and quantum.

Embodied intelligence reaches consumer scale. UBTECH's Walker C1 humanoid built for "urban co-existence," ballroom-dancing with human partners. China's EngineAI activated a 10,000-unit humanoid production line in Shenzhen with T800 units shipping. Robot barbers in China giving millimeter-precision haircuts for under a dollar using 3D scanning + AI — "the deflationary promise of automation tangible."

Biology rewritten. Eli Lilly's retatrutide trial showed weight loss matching gastric bypass surgery for the heaviest patients; observers note 28.3% bodyweight loss over 80 weeks with zero cardiac or liver signals positions retatrutide to become the best-selling drug of all time. Colossal Biosciences' silicone-membrane artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens — foundational step toward dodo / South Island giant moa de-extinction.

Off-world roadmap expanding. SpaceX Starlink announced interplanetary roaming aiming for "Gigabit connectivity anywhere on the Moon." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman expects China to do a crewed lunar flyby in 2027 — the next space race is booked. Starship V3 launched on Starship's 12th flight test. Department of War's second UAP release under the PURSUE program included 40+ videos requested by Rep. Luna's task force.

Economy restructuring around its new factor of production. ClickUp cut 22% of headcount despite booming business, introducing $1M salary bands for engineers who orchestrate agents rather than write code, branding itself a "100x org." AT&T suing California to escape a $1B/yr mandate to maintain copper for the 3% of households still on it. Gavin Newsom signed an EO telling California agencies to study subsidizing companies that retain (not replace) employees. White House postponed its own AI pre-release model-review EO after anti-doomer pushback. Steve Wozniak got cheers (not boos) telling Grand Valley State graduates they all have "AI: actual intelligence." OpenAI booked $5.7B in Q1 revenue, ~$1B ahead of Anthropic, with Codex, B2B sales, and ChatGPT ads driving growth.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

• LLM matching superforecaster performance on ForecastBench. Directly relevant to the investing toolchain — the bet-decision and thesis-backtest workflows already presume that frontier models can be wired as judgment-augmenting collaborators, but "matches superforecaster" is a load-bearing threshold for any future move toward LLM-issued forward calls in /investing skills. Worth a follow-up search for the actual ForecastBench leaderboard / methodology before treating it as actionable.
• Qwen3.7-Max 35-hour autonomous execution with 1,158 tool calls. The duration is the signal — this is the longest-horizon autonomous run cited in the vault to date. RDCO's /check-board autonomous loop currently runs in much shorter bursts; the headroom for longer autonomous spans on more complex pipelines (e.g. multi-day investing-backtest sweeps, the v2 video production workflow's 12-stage chain) is widening. File under "the autonomy ceiling keeps moving up."
• HBM at 63% of AI chip spend; smartphones -13% from memory crowdout. Two signals on the same vector — the memory layer is the binding constraint and starting to bleed into adjacent consumer markets. Direct fit for the AI-infrastructure investing thesis cluster (memory / power / DC infra). Worth checking whether this lands in the /investing:hyperscaler-capex anchor data on next quarterly pulse.
• Anthropic-Maia talks (second silicon source). Pattern continuation of the substrate-diversification thesis. Anthropic has now publicly diversified across TPU (Google), Trainium (AWS), and now potentially Maia (Microsoft), with SpaceX/xAI compute payments running in parallel. The "one frontier lab, N silicon vendors" architecture is hardening — useful framing for any Sanity Check angle on vendor concentration in the AI buildout.
• ClickUp "$1M salary bands for agent orchestrators, 22% cut" / "100x org" branding. Hard datapoint for the labor-substitution narrative being made operationally explicit by a mid-cap SaaS. This is exactly the empirical anchor needed for Sanity Check pieces on the "small org with leverage" thesis that RDCO itself embodies. Worth a research-brief queue: "the 100x org is now a job posting" — what's the actual ClickUp memo say?
• Retatrutide 28.3% bodyweight loss / 80 weeks / zero cardiac or liver signals. Founder-specific personal-context relevance (per user_health_clinical: MASLD stable, tracking retatrutide, target 180 lbs). Worth flagging in morning brief as a data update on a previously-tracked therapeutic, not just a generic capability marker. The MASLD-stable framing in the founder's clinical context becomes more decision-relevant if retatrutide moves from "tracking" to "candidate" — file this and let the founder make that call.
• White House postponed AI pre-release EO after anti-doomer pushback. Walks back the [[2026-05-21-innermost-loop-may-21-openai-erdos-disproved]] signal that an FDA-style pre-release notification regime was imminent. Useful as a non-linearity example: regulatory direction reversed inside a 48-hour news cycle. Worth surfacing as evidence for the "regulatory drift is not unidirectional" Sanity Check angle.
• Quantum $2B grants with government equity. Pattern echo of the customer-becomes-owner architecture seen in OpenAI-Cerebras warrants (April 17). State capitalism in the AI buildout is no longer subtle — file alongside the [[2026-05-19-innermost-loop-first-major-exchange-compute-futures]] piece for the broader "AI substrate is becoming a state-backed asset class" framing.
• OpenAI Q1 $5.7B (~$1B ahead of Anthropic). Hard datapoint on the OpenAI-Anthropic revenue gap. Lands directly in the existing investing-thesis cluster on hyperscaler / frontier-lab economic geometry. Worth noting the composition: "Codex, B2B sales, and ChatGPT ads" — the ads line is the one that should make the Anthropic-style "we don't do ads" positioning sharper if it holds.

Related

• [[2026-05-21-innermost-loop-may-21-openai-erdos-disproved]] — yesterday's issue; the Erdős disproof is referenced as the launch point for the "GPT-5.5 counterexample as flag of AI" framing here
• [[2026-05-20-innermost-loop-may-20-singularity-calendar-futures-encyclical]]
• [[2026-05-19-innermost-loop-first-major-exchange-compute-futures]] — compute-as-asset-class thread; today's quantum grants extend the pattern
• [[2026-05-18-innermost-loop-singularity-audits-its-own-mind]]
• [[2026-05-17-innermost-loop-singularity-leaking-through-the-cracks]]
• [[2026-05-12-innermostloop-singularity-matures-state-of-ai]]
• [[2026-05-03-innermost-loop-all-that-is-solid-melts-into-compute]] — substrate-bottleneck thread
• [[2026-04-29-every-compute-is-new-cash]] — compute-economics adjacent

Copyright note

Source: Alex Wissner-Gross, The Innermost Loop (Substack), May 22, 2026. All claims paraphrased; direct quotations capped at ≤15 words. Read the original at the source URL above.