Practitioners start saying it out loud

The people closest to the systems stop hedging — takeoff, magnitude-9 earthquake, AGI — and the corpus records who said what and when, because these are datable claims rather than analysis. The thread opens on 27 December 2025 with Roon saying we are solidly in the takeoff and Karpathy calling it a magnitude 9 earthquake in software engineering; a week later Musk said we have entered the Singularity. The declarations then move from mood to mechanism: in February Altman’s inside view pointed to a faster takeoff, in March an alignment lead said recursive self-improvement is a present phenomenon, and in May a co-founder put 60% odds on it by 2028. The chipmaker’s chief said AGI has been achieved in March and AGI has arrived in September, three days after a lab president declared welcome to the AGI era. The thread is the spoken half of recursive self-improvement; the measured half sits there.