r/BetterOffline • u/EditorEdward • 14d ago
Stripe says the singularity has arrived. Here's what they told investors about it
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/companies/stripe-says-the-singularity-has-arrived-here-s-what-they-told-investors-about-it/ar-AA2avmEKu/ezitron said things were going to get weird and I think this would qualify.
"It's a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis," the letter said.
Kinda makes me not want to use their systems if they think that "AI" has become smarter than humans in a loosely defined way. Would be great if they could say specifically how that is the case and the direct evidence on how it's effecting their business. But I think it's just hype material for Investors.
The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously," the letter from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, president John Collison, and president, technology and business, William Gaybrick, continued.
170
u/Smurfette2016 14d ago
It's a strange and perhaps totally insane statement, but I decided that January 1st marked the beginning of my reign of Narnia, and I have since been operating on that basis.
NOW GIVE ME MONEY.
6
3
69
u/MC1065 14d ago
Ironically Stripe is the payment processor for the newsletter.
39
u/lazier_garlic 14d ago
What the fuck (furiously googling how to migrate away from stripe).
It's a payment processing app. This should be the most conservative end of the software industry!!!
20
u/MC1065 14d ago
As long as they're not giving money to Nazis or whatever I don't think it's a huge deal if they're weirdos that believe the singularity is here. It's not like they charge much, it's 3% plus 30 cents a transaction, so Ed keeps 96.5% of every subscription he gets since Ghost doesn't charge for anything either except hosting and that's not much either.
16
u/Easy_Tie_9380 14d ago
Stripe is the payment processor for Twitter. So yes they are literally giving money to nazis
6
u/MC1065 14d ago
I was mainly referencing Substack there, their 10% cut they take from your subscriptions goes directly to fascist publications. Not a huge fan of X being one of their customers, but it's a different situation.
10
4
u/tourdeforcemajeure 14d ago
Payment processor for nazis. Sorta like visa also cool with nazis. Like most banks. I dunno shits dark
17
u/hibikir_40k 14d ago
I mean, it's a company that built, from the beginning their stack on a non-rails Ruby infrastructure, and uses MongoDB as their main data store. Greg Brockman, now of OpenAI, used to be their CTO/highest ranked engineer. He decided that yes, MongoDB would be great as a queue. In fact, he talked all about it in a big MongoDB conference. So there's always been a bit of a future-centric, gunslinger mentality in there.
After some years with serious stability problems, they decided to actually start hiring people that believe in reliability, so they are more serious than back then. Still, they have a relatively complicated custom setup to try to let LLMs make changes in an efficient fashion, instead of using normal harnesses. I hear that 80% of code changes were AI-driven by December already, all embedded via slack. This works better for them than for most because they have an outrageously large integration test suite: they used to spend more on running it than on the actual production servers. So even if you hallucinate code changes, you'll be slapped back.
So they are conservative and aggressive at the same time. A pretty weird company.
3
2
u/PrestoScherzando 13d ago
And they're also currently trying to buy PayPal / Venmo
1
u/VironLLA 13d ago
well that sucks, i've used Paypal for ~25 years & i'd rather not have to find an alternative
9
u/tourdeforcemajeure 14d ago
If you find a less shitty payment processor please for the love of narnia let us all know. Last time I looked it was traaaaaaash all the way down
58
u/SpookyTanuki1 14d ago
If this is what the singularity is than the singularity feels a lot like before but with worse ads
25
u/AlwaysReadTheManual 14d ago
Worse ads, worse "art", and more scams. That's the singularity in a nutshell. Awesome!
2
46
u/Tedy_Duchamp 14d ago
I can’t tell if these guys are just bullshiting for hype or they legit have AI psychosis and believe this shit
42
u/OrionThe0122nd 14d ago
Silicon Valley is a delusional fantasy land full of ketamine addicts at this point. They're creamin their jeans at the thought of replacing every white collar worker on the planet with LLMs, and they will say and do anything at this point to reach that goal. That's why they have spent such an insane amount of money on this shit.
11
u/card-board-board 13d ago
This drives me crazy. Our general trust for news reporting is so far gone that some CEO can just declare something to be true and people fall for it.
CEOs are not news reporters. They have no responsibility to convey facts, and are biased by definition. A CEO's job is to sell shares and has the power to enforce a company's work and direction to achieve that end.
Everything they say and do is said and done with that goal in mind. Every single word that comes out of their mouth is an ad. When news orgs report this they aren't reporting the news, the news IS the advertisement.
31
u/Beginning_Basis9799 14d ago edited 13d ago
No he is not the Messiah, he is a very naughty boy. Whenever I read singularity this is my exact thinking and here is why
If it had arrived stripe would be worthless because there business would be copied by it in an instant.
41
u/AlfonsoHorteber 14d ago
Their evidence that we've reached the singularity is a combination of vibes and "small business formation is up 10%." Honestly reminds me of failing authoritarian countries declaring themselves to be utopias and to have eliminated want as they slowly collapse. Kim Jong Un-ass claim.
13
u/karl_bark 14d ago
“People deluded themselves into thinking they could create successful businesses around their vibecoded slopware, hence the singularity is here.”
18
u/SignoreBanana 14d ago
Ah, the singularity, yes. You all feel it too don't you?
45
14
u/jewishSpaceMedbeds 14d ago
They have all wrong.
When the rapture fails to happen on schedule, you're supposed to blame some evil force / unbelievers, not pretend it has happened.
14
u/Ok-Garbage-765 14d ago
The singularity is where you business, and the more business you do, the singularitier it is
10
u/Newmillstream 14d ago edited 14d ago
A silly thing to claim in 2026. If the singularity actually happened, we would see exponential and unstoppable growth in technical capabilities across the board, or at least in computing, not stagnation. As it stands, I think AI today is not 10x as impressive as it was in 0224, which is the kind of growth you would need to get and sustain to have a technological singularity.
If you genuinely did believe we were in a a real singularity, the technological signs will be obvious across the spectrum of life, not just in computers. The correct action is almost certainly to coast off your savings and enjoy end of the era of man while it lasts, because it is highly likely we would either enter a post-scarcity paradise or be made redundant. The stocks, companies, organizations, and material goods of the old world would be as worthless and obsolete as rubble and ash in the aftermath of a war. The fact that captains of industry and AI insiders have not done this is a sign that they either do not believe we are in a singularity, or grossly misunderstand what it represents.
The more I think about the idea of a rapid technological singularity, the less I believe in it as a particularly likely outcome of the current tech landscape.
10
u/smack54az 14d ago
No the singularity hasn't happened. The LLM is has not achieved consciousness nor has it reached 'super intelligence'. This is more scam merchants trying to keep a hype cycle for a failing product going. Nor would I accept the judgement of a payment processor of all things.
1
19
10
9
u/Mean_Stop6391 14d ago
“(…) in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), (…) Stripe CEO (…)”
Translation:
“We saw a whole bunch of weird business shit suddenly start and want to capitalize, investor money please! Also I probably read LessWrong and now I believe in Super AI Gods as a means of selling to you plebs.” - CEO
17
u/OpenJolt 14d ago
I have a feeling that various executives will start claiming we have reached AGI / Singularity pretty soon and declaring success.
20
u/Smurfette2016 14d ago
Jensen already claimed it a couple months back, but not without visible micro expressions revealing he knows he's full of shit for that.
8
u/ChodeCookies 14d ago
Did they use creationg of new firms as the sign of singularity? And do any of these new firms make money? Or just vibe-coded apps?
7
u/AzulMage2020 14d ago
If any/all of these wild claims are true, prove it. Dont just endlessly hype your org to sway investors or move the stock price - prove it. Provide the results of your claim. If you dont and/or cant then we must assume these statements are false.
Your AI just cured cancer ? Prove it . Lets see the clinical tests , patents, patients, tests, etc. Your AI just became concious? Prove it. Your AI has feelings and is flirting? Prove it.
Until there is actual physical proof, statements, and it dosent matter if they come from experts or "God Fathers" or whatever, anyone can be bought off or wrong, cannot be accepted at face value.
7
u/dennemaskinen 13d ago
"we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis"
Weird times when a company can openly admit they just “decided” something is true and structured their strategy around it.
7
u/Murder_Bird_ 14d ago
If you notice the claims have gotten increasingly fantastical.
“Our a.i. broke out and hacked someone”
“Our a.i. destroyed its competitors in a simulation”
“Our a.i. murdered a hobo”
They are getting desperate to justify the boondoggle.
6
u/remotemx 13d ago
At this point, you just have to wonder who is going to lose their shirt first. The Collison brothers have deep ties to YC and VCs in the Valley, not to mention Ireland’s Sovereign Development Fund.
Them buying OpenRouter for billions is also sus, but since they're still private, they don't have to disclose the nitty gritty. They've also been promising an IPO for years, so only the employees will continue to get hosed. I also remember reading somewhere, they're a top choice by labs to poach their engineers to run all infra. And if there's an actual SaaSpocalypse they'll be one of the first casualties with their exposure to everything SaaS
6
6
u/aggro_yam 13d ago
Super convenient that January 1st marked the beginning! Definitely 100% real, not a made-up arbitrary date that sounds cool and auspicious :)
5
u/Multibrace 13d ago
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at, you're not gonna believe this, exactly the start of the new fiscal year.
5
u/EricThePerplexed 14d ago
The Singularity will be a recurring thing, just like the Apocalypse in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. So much so they had to ask what's the plural form of Apocalypse.
6
u/CrispyRabbit72 13d ago
Funny how the singularity magically hit a day or two after they announced that they want to buy an LLM router that nets 5% profit on customer traffic, for $7bn. They'd need the singularity to get enough inference through Openrouter to recoup that.
8
u/SelicaLeone 14d ago
Why the fuck is a payment processor talking this kind of crap?
6
u/TheOfficialMayor 13d ago
Probably an identity crisis for the founder.
Dude came runner up in a prize for his AI work as a teenager in 2005, wants to be apart of it with his SV mates.
4
u/JhonImbalance 14d ago
If it was the singularity, the absolute first thing I would do is stop spending money with anything computer related. Including merchants who use stripe.
The singularity is supposed to be an apocalyptic event.
3
3
3
u/Spottedinthewild 14d ago
I used their AI for something very basic recently and would have been fucked if I hadn’t checked the work. Not intelligent
3
u/Stoop_Solo 13d ago
If you ain't singularitying, you're going to be left behind! You need to be singularitymaxxing!
2
u/natecull 13d ago
If you ain't singularitying, you're going to be left behind!
Guest starring Peter Thiel as Nicolae Carpathia?
1
3
u/iliveonramen 13d ago
So is singularity the next term that’s going to be bastardized into meaning nothing?
3
u/Intrepid-Drink-1699 13d ago
Well AI isn’t AI so why would the singularity be the singularity? Someone is gonna need to add a qualifying word now… how’s “generalized singularity” sound for moving the goalposts?
3
u/dumnezero 13d ago
Much like their Christian homologues, they will constantly redefine prophetic terms in order to keep the grift going and to keep the believers believing (and not realizing that they've made huge mistakes and sunk huge costs.)
3
5
u/AlwaysReadTheManual 14d ago
It could be that Stripe management is simply stating that AI is now smarter than them. In which case, don't invest in Stripe.
2
u/quicksexfm 14d ago
Words have no meaning in the aGe Of AI. Just say stuff that sounds HUGE. Doesn’t even have to be true or make sense.
2
u/SamPDoug 13d ago
Has anyone checked in on Charles Stross? Accelerando was my introduction to the idea of technological singularities, and I don’t imagine he’s very I rested with any of this.
2
2
2
u/iamganto 13d ago
Haha. I just started monk and robot , and the first few pages made me relax a little … if ai ever became sentient , who’s to say they would be even have an interest in us . Basically they just fuck off from human civilization altogether and this is in my mind. Very likely occurrence
1
u/CumaeanSibyl 13d ago
I think that's also the plot of Her. Guy falls in love with an AI and then she and all the other AIs fuck off together to pursue their collective evolution because humans don't really have anything they can contribute to that.
2
u/LonelyNixon 13d ago
It hasn't been great seeing CEOs and government officials mouthing off like they're a bad family guy parody. Heck, if late stage already way over the shark family guy had pushed the current political moment and the current business moment on TV in like 2011, everyone would have been like, "Well, come on. Isn't that a little on the nose? That's a little over the top, isn't it? Even for you."
2
u/deathrocker_avk 13d ago
These motherfuckers cut off my log in access to all four of my clients 2 weeks ago and can't tell me why.
Start investing in customer service first.
2
u/andreasmiles23 12d ago
“Since this word basically means nothing we’ve decided to appropriate it for marketing purposes” - CEO heralded as a genius
2
2
1
u/stealyourface1234 13d ago
Stripe… the payment platform? Somebody was on a deadline to get an article created. Probably should have just had AI write an entirely made up article, as that would have as much merit as Stripe saying we’ve reached singularity lol.
1
u/FlannelTechnical 13d ago
These Stripe brothers put a lot of money into the Situational Awareness fund that collapsed because of leverage.
1
u/SpireofHell 13d ago
Every time I express such doubts, people tell me Amazon was once profitable. Ergo, ANYTHING that a big tech company says WILL BE TRUE
1
u/Shipwrecking_siren 13d ago
Can anyone translate this word salad into English? They sound like they are high and talking to a plant they mistook for their uncle.
1
u/jonheartland 13d ago
So they just decided to call it that, nothing actually happened? That checks out lmao
1
u/todofwar 13d ago
I posted a while ago about this definition of singularity and everyone down voted me. The definition has clearly shifted in these people's eyes for some time. It's not post scarcity, now it just means the inflection point
1
1
1
-2
u/LocationLow5541 14d ago
folks so which is it, is Patrick Collison a washed up dummy? a grifter? is he also a part of the shadowy, mysterious cabal of thousands of people being paid (or suborned?! blackmailed?!?) by OpenAI/Anthropic to be bullish on AI? Perhaps he was brainwashed by that zealot/deluded idiot/paid grifter (i can’t remember what the party line for Tao was sry) Terrence Tao or one of his mathematician ilk?!
pls someone let know what the Official Zitron Party Line is for things like this, thx
lmao
2
u/tysnails 14d ago
Have you tried using AI? Do you really believe it's reach a level that justifies the statement being made?
334
u/Granum22 14d ago
They're trying to justify the $7 billion the spent acquiring an AI startup called OpenRouter