Codex Hits "Escape Velocity" as GPT-5.5 Doubles Its Math Olympiad Score and Three More Erdős Problems Fall

The best way to measure where we are right now is probably to imagine how astonished the past would be by the present. Alec Radford and colleagues just launched Talkie, a 13B "vintage" model trained only on pre-1931 text, which was reportedly especially astonished by the events of the 1960s. By that yardstick, today is going to break Talkie.

OpenAI's Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux said this week that "Codex has achieved escape velocity and will keep improving rapidly," which is the kind of thing you say when the self-improvement loop is now baked into the dev cycle itself. The model layer is fanning out around it. Nvidia launched Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, an open multimodal model topping six leaderboards for document, video, and audio understanding. AWS is rolling OpenAI's models directly onto Bedrock, which effectively lets customers self-host frontier intelligence. GPT-5.5 xhigh just topped KernelBench at 6.57% for writing GPU kernels, which means the AI is now optimizing the hardware that runs it. Sam Altman is calling for a wholesale rethink of operating systems, interfaces, and internet protocols so that people and agents can natively share the same surfaces.

If you needed a single domain to watch what this looks like in practice, math is the one. GPT-5.5 just scored a record 73.66% on MathArena on fresh olympiad problems, more than doubling GPT-5.4's 36.61% and re-pricing what counts as a hard problem. MIT senior David Turturean reports that "GPT-5.5 has been finding solutions quicker than I, the human, can process them," with three full Erdős problem solutions already claimed and more in the supervision queue. Another observer noted that the LLMs are simultaneously doing a long-overdue cleaning task, sweeping up neglected open problems and giving them proper statements as they go. Mathematicians are becoming curators of synthetic genius rather than the source of it.

The agents are also moving into the workflow itself. OpenAI's new Symphony orchestrator turns a Linear board into a control plane where every open ticket gets its own continuously running agent, with humans reduced to reviewing the diffs. The same logic is climbing the security clearance ladder. Google just signed a classified AI deal with the Pentagon for "any lawful government purpose," which indicates that the fence around frontier intelligence is being moved closer to the situation room.

The infrastructure underneath all of this is sprawling outward. Two-thirds of planned data centers are now headed for rural farm country chasing cheap land and tax incentives, inverting the 87% urban concentration of existing facilities. The capital math is wobbling at the same time. OpenAI reportedly missed its user and revenue targets, with CFO Sarah Friar voicing concern about funding future compute contracts. The fix may be structural. A revised Microsoft agreement lets OpenAI ship across any cloud and ends the Redmond revenue share, which one observer translated simply as "OpenAI can use Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium."

With the silicon stack reshuffled, atoms are racing to catch up with bits. Extrapolating from Epoch AI's analysis, humanoid robot production should cross drones around 2033 and wheeled robots around 2034, which implies the embodied workforce is on the same exponential as the disembodied one. The ceiling is rising in parallel. True Anomaly raised $650 million for space interceptors to support the White House's Golden Dome project, extending the kill chain into orbit.

Biology is being rewritten by the same kind of foundation models. The Doudna Lab used the Evo2 model to discover VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), a programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR and operates on entirely different logic. Meanwhile, in a reminder that wildlife often flourishes where humans retreat, even amid the war Iran has reported a jump in Asiatic cheetah numbers, a rare wartime upside for an endangered species.

The economy is reorganizing around the new abundance. The California billionaire tax is heading to the November ballot, which threatens to deepen the tech exodus already underway. The Dead Internet Theory was quietly confirmed this week too, with roughly a third of websites created since 2022 turning out to be AI-generated or AI-assisted. Meta is preparing to unwind its Manus acquisition after China blocked the $2B deal on national-security grounds. Labor is moving in lockstep with the chip splurge. US employers announced 60,602 March job cuts, up 25% from February, with tech leading at 18,720 and AI cited as the top reason across all industries. The Musk v. Altman trial jury was seated just as both founders prepare blockbuster IPOs for SpaceX and OpenAI. And in Ottawa, PM Mark Carney announced Canada's first sovereign wealth fund to bankroll energy, minerals, agriculture, and infrastructure of national interest.

Compound interest was always the Singularity, just running on slower models.

That's today. More tomorrow.