At the start of this year, Tesla and xAI boss Elon Musk predicted that 2026 will be the “year of the Singularity.” Singularity is described as the moment when artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it begins to surpass human intelligence and starts improving itself. Now, just three months into the year, it seems Musk’s prediction may already be showing early signs. A new experimental project from Andrej Karpathy, one of the early members of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla, shows how AI systems could autonomously run experiments to improve other models.
Karpathy recently introduced a project called “autoresearch.” He built a system in which an AI agent repeatedly modifies and tests the training code of a language model in an automated loop. Instead of human researchers manually adjusting code, testing parametres and evaluating results, this AI agent itself proposes changes to the model, runs experiments, measures performance and keeps the versions that perform better.
In simple terms, Karpathy’s experiment shows how an AI system can try to improve itself without constant human intervention. Sharing results from the project online, Andrej Karpathy revealed how the AI agent ran hundreds of experiments autonomously and gradually improved the model step by step.
“Who knew early singularity could be this fun? 🙂 I just confirmed that the improvements autoresearch found over the last two days of (~650) experiments on a depth-12 model transfer well to depth-24, so nanochat is about to get a new leaderboard entry for ‘time to GPT-2’ too. Works,” he wrote in one of his posts on X.
Karpathy’s project quickly became a topic of discussion across the AI community, highlighting how the project could show early indicators of what technologists call the technological singularity. “The singularity has begun. so many signs,” wrote Tobi Lutke in response to the development. Musk also agreed with Lutke’s comments.
What is singularity?
The term singularity refers to a point where artificial intelligence is expected to surpass human intelligence and begins improving itself rapidly without human intervention. Once machines become capable of designing better versions of themselves, often linked with the idea of Artificial General Intelligence, researchers suggest it could accelerate progress rapidly, potentially leading to breakthroughs far beyond its current capabilities.
Now, Karpathy’s project is still a small research prototype and far from the kind of self-improving intelligence imagined in science fiction. However, it does give us a sneak peek into how AI will manage to self-improve.
Tech leaders say AI will reach singularity in 2026
As for the timeline of when machines could truly become “superintelligent”, several leaders in the AI industry believe it may arrive sooner than expected.
Speaking earlier at the World Economic Forum, Musk suggested that AI could surpass the intelligence of any single human by the end of 2026, and potentially exceed the combined intelligence of all humans by around 2030.
He also argued that once AI becomes this capable, superintelligent systems combined with humanoid robots could eventually eliminate the need for traditional work, potentially leading to what he described as a “universal high income.”
It’s not just Musk making such predictions. Earlier, Sam Altman, in his essay “The Gentle Singularity,” published in June 2025, argued that humanity may already be approaching the “event horizon” of the singularity and that the technological “takeoff has started.”
Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis has also suggested that the world is approaching a “threshold moment” with the rise of autonomous, agentic AI systems. However, he notes that true AGI will still take time and may be five to eight years away.
