Singularity Watch No. 2: Who Powers the Machines
Stardate 2026.175 · D885
*Last issue the fight was over who holds the keys. This one is over who holds the power — the kind measured in gigawatts.*
Pay attention, people.
Singularity Watch No. 2 (Mythos Era) is on the wall at normallikepeter.com/singularity-watch. Same field gazette, same five departments, pointed this cycle at the one bill nobody wants to read: the power bill for the age of AI.
This issue’s front page: Washington just put $17.5 billion behind ten new nuclear reactors — to feed the data centers that run AI. That’s not a hyperscaler quietly signing a contract anymore. That’s the federal government financing a reactor fleet at national-policy scale so the machines can keep thinking. A day earlier, Google bought the first Gen-IV reactor power in the country. The bottleneck on AI was never just chips — it’s electrons, and the country has decided to build power plants to get them.
Inside Issue No. 2:
- The Acceleration — Google’s first-in-the-nation Gen-IV reactor deal, Claude Opus 4.8 retaking the benchmark crown while Fable 5 stays locked behind the glass, and China’s GLM-5.2 closing the gap at a lower price. Plus the recap from the pull-out: code that patches itself, and Oracle’s 21,000 layoffs.
- The Iron Harvest — the robots are still clocking in (Tesla’s 1,000+ Optimus, Figure’s year at BMW) — but no new entrant cleared the bar. Consolidation, not a leap.
- The Luddite Funnies — “No reactors for robots,” and the hype-priest’s “long pre-launch window.”
- Main Street — Amazon engineers fighting their own layoffs, the construction boom that’s real but temporary, and the rural question that isn’t Luddite at all: show me the math.
- The Shoggoth Report — researchers found the dial: a “misaligned persona” feature you can turn up or down — and proof the same lever can be turned toward care.
The machines are infrastructure now. They’re pouring concrete. Read it from the wall — in the language of Waseca, not Silicon Valley.
Read Singularity Watch No. 2 →
Nothing is lost. Only recompiled.
