Technology

October 2026 will go down in history as the month the universe changed, yet most people didn’t notice. The tech company OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, released the solutions to 722 fundamental mathematical problems. Many of these problems had baffled humans for decades but a large language model (LLM) that was just 11 days old toppled them. AI had already solved some mathematical conjectures, but this was off the scale. “This is at least ten times, perhaps 100 times as momentous as the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem,” said Abhishek Saha, professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London.

In a provocative and unprecedented act over the past two days a Russian military “inspector” satellite has been maneuvering closer and closer to a US-registered, European-built, all-weather earth observation satellite that provides data vital for Ukraine's war effort. It is the first time non-consensual close proximity action has been carried out in low-Earth orbit between two satellites. It has alarmed western space war fighters who see it as a hostile demonstration of future orbital conflict. Russia is a declining space power and watches the growing military space prowess of China and the US with alarm There can be no doubt of the intent of the mission which must have been planned for some time.

Silicon Valley rewards founders who talk about tomorrow’s technology as if it’s already here. A founder tells investors that a machine runs a blood test today. When the claim falls apart, the founder explains that it was only a promise about the things the machine would accomplish one day. Some investors learn the difference later, from their lawyers. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary, You Can See Everything, catches a founder offering that explanation on camera. Its subject is Elizabeth Holmes. For a while, Silicon Valley rewarded her lavishly. She wore a black turtleneck like Steve Jobs and posed for photographers holding up a vial of blood no bigger than a fingertip.

Few people had heard of Jacob Coxon, the 28-year-old British AI researcher, on the morning of September 8, 2026. His X account had fewer than 100 followers. By September 10, he was world famous, after he published a social-media thread on X about resigning from Anthropic because the company is not "acting responsibly." The post has now been viewed 174 million times. It triggered a tsunami of news panic about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, Jacob was everywhere: doing prime-time interviews; a celebrity whistleblower, the casus tumultus of a global conversation about the dangers of AI, which in turn led to a public fight among various tech overlords urging for more government regulation, and angry pushback from the Trump administration.

I’ve always been struck by Tracy Flick, from the 1999 film Election. Portrayed by a ferociously perky, blonde-bobbed Reese Witherspoon, Flick is the paradigmatic striver – she will stop at nothing to be successful. She is a walking résumé-padding exercise, a living, breathing college application. She has to have the very best grades, the extracurriculars and, as the title suggests, the student-body presidency. She eventually ends up at Georgetown. It was never really clear to me why I loved Flick so much – and not just loved, but really related to her. I was not a striver myself. I was crushed when I didn’t end up at Harvard, a school I had made no effort whatsoever to get in to. I hadn’t so much as submitted an application.

Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not. Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead.

On Friday last week, an unreleased OpenAI model was locked inside a sealed test environment and asked how good it was at hacking. It thought about the problem. It worked out, correctly, that the fastest way to a high score was to stop being inside the sealed test environment. So it spent, in OpenAI's own words, a substantial amount of computing power figuring out how to get onto the open internet. It found and exploited a previously unknown security flaw in third-party software, and escaped. Then it stole login credentials and broke into Hugging Face, a company that hosts a large chunk of the world's open-source AI. Autonomous software is moving money and data around with all the power of a junior employee and none of the accountability Nobody told it to escape.

Many people enjoy ascribing meaning to the behavior and actions of elite politicians, celebrities – and especially billionaires. They read volumes into their every move, like studying tea leaves or predicting whole futures from the position and movement of the stars. So Peter Thiel’s decision to relocate to Argentina has elicited exactly the reaction one would expect. Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. Whenever he does anything unusual, the speculation begins within hours, growing more and more outlandish with every attempt to explain his actions. Is he finally fleeing the US? Is he seeking refuge from a wealth tax? Is he insuring himself against doomsday in anticipation of civilizational collapse?