What's this about?
Axios's Dan Primack obtained Stripe's letter to investors, which declares that "the singularity" has begun, alongside first-half performance data. Ethan Mollick's response framed the problem precisely: either the Singularity is now a marketing term, or Stripe genuinely believes we are at a point beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue — which would make forward-looking financial statements useless.
What exactly is "the singularity"?
The term comes from John von Neumann, paraphrased by Stanislaw Ulam, describing "some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." It was later popularized by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil for the moment machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence and progress becomes unpredictable to us. The word's technical meaning is precisely the point Mollick makes: a singularity is where your models stop being able to predict anything. A company cannot coherently tell investors both that the future is unpredictable in principle and that here is our revenue guidance.
Why is this worth noticing?
- It's the term completing its journey from technical concept to marketing vocabulary, which David Pfau spent this week complaining about — begging anyone using "singularity" to read Vinge and Kurzweil rather than meaning "there is a lot of progress in this technology."
- The internal contradiction is real, not pedantic. Forward-looking statements are a regulated genre resting on the assumption that the future is forecastable.
- Stripe is not a lab. A payments company opening its investor letter this way says more about how far the vocabulary has spread than any lab announcement would.