THE CURVE AND THE CEILING
Thursday was marked on the calendar in real time: OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, Tesla launched the CyberCab, and the note went up calling it an important day (x.com). But the louder signal was not any single launch. It was the slope underneath. OpenRouter processed 4.6 trillion tokens a week last September. Today it processes 114 trillion. That is 25x in twelve months - a vertical wall, not a plateau (x.com).
The slope has a shape anyone can recite now. Last September the models answered questions. By December they reasoned through problems. By March they used your computer. By June they worked for hours on their own. This September they run teams of agents in parallel (x.com). Five rungs in twelve months, each one a category of work that did not exist the season before.
And on the same day, a bill arrived in the Senate to permanently ban any AI that surpasses human intelligence, with twenty years in prison for violators. The reply: I have bad news for you Bernie (x.com). A ban is written against a snapshot. The thing it names will be twenty-five times bigger by the time the ink dries. You can legislate against a version. You cannot legislate against a curve. The only question left is what gets built on the way through it.