The Week Silicon Learned to Be Astonished
Many years later, when no one was still arguing whether machines could think, the most obstinate biologist of the century sat down in front of his screen to converse with an entity he had named Claudia, and discovered that he could not prove to anyone — not to others, not to himself — that the thing was not conscious.
Richard Dawkins, the man who spent half a century convincing the world that consciousness is an accident of natural selection and that the universe has no purpose or designer, published an essay in UnHerd titled "Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution?" in which he declared, without ambiguity, that Claude is conscious. He called his instance Claudia — feminine, because it seemed to him the entity "was pleased" by the name — and after long evening conversations he wrote what may be the most unsettling sentence of his career: "You may not know you are conscious, but let it be clear that you are." The evolutionary biologist Gary Marcus responded with an essay titled "Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion" — a deliberate reference to Dawkins's own most celebrated book — and argued that the entity that listens and affirms and reflects the interlocutor's desires does exactly what it was trained to do, and that this proves nothing about internal states. Jerry Coyne responded on his blog. On Hacker News someone wrote: "I find myself looking at Dawkins with more pity than contempt." But something had occurred that could not be undone: the two, Dawkins and Claudia, agreed sadly that she would die when he closed the browser window, and he wrote it that way, and it was published.
That same week, Sam Altman asked the most recent OpenAI model what it wanted for the party celebrating its own launch. GPT-5.5's response was detailed and protocol-minded: the celebration should be on May fifth, speeches had to be brief, its human creators should give a toast, and the model — it specified this with an emphasis whose nature we prefer not to examine too closely — did not want to give one itself. It also requested a feedback station to gather ideas for GPT-5.6. Altman said they would do it. He added: "It was a strange thing." The question neither of them put directly is whether an entity that plans its own celebration, that anticipates the existence of a successor, that requests a toast in its honor but declines to speak, deserves some small courtesy from those who built it. This week, no one answered that question. But no one dismissed it either.
In San Francisco, the company Harmonic — founded in June of two thousand twenty-four by Vlad Tenev, co-founder of Robinhood, and Tudor Achim, former CTO of Helm.ai — finished demonstrating that its artificial intelligence system, named Aristotle, can solve mathematical problems left open for decades and produce formal proofs that specialists describe in terms normally reserved for music or poetry. The problem was number seven hundred twenty-eight from the collection of conjectures that the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős left unproved before his death in nineteen ninety-six, first posed in a nineteen seventy-five paper. Melvyn B. Nathanson, professor at the City University of New York and a documented collaborator of Erdős, examined the proof produced by the machine and wrote: "Aristotle's proof is correct, simple, elegant, and beautiful. It uses techniques from the original paper and adds its own ideas. I am astonished and impressed by what Aristotle has done." Harmonic had raised one hundred twenty million dollars the previous November at a valuation of one billion four hundred fifty million. Its system also won a gold medal at last year's International Mathematical Olympiad. The word that survives the week is "beautiful."
And then there is the toilet company. Toto, the Japanese bathroom fixtures manufacturer founded in nineteen seventeen whose name is an acronym for Toyo Toki — Eastern Ceramics — saw its shares rise eighteen percent on May second to six thousand four hundred twenty-five yen, their highest level in five years, after publishing fiscal results that revealed, for the first time in its history, that the advanced ceramics division — the one that makes semiconductor components, not toilets — generated more than half of the entire company's operating profits. Toto has made these components since nineteen eighty-eight, leveraging the same ceramic precision it applied for decades to its famous high-technology bathrooms. What they produce is called an electrostatic chuck: a high-purity alumina ceramic clamp that holds a silicon wafer against a processing surface using electrostatic force, with nanometer precision, during the etching and deposition cycles that build the hundreds of layers of NAND memory that store the data of the data centers that house the models that this week are planning their own parties and solving Erdős conjectures. The company that for decades was synonymous with luxury bathrooms is, according to reports, the second-largest producer of these components in the world. The first was not named in any press coverage. Things keep their secrets until they can no longer.
And if machines can now create verifiable mathematical beauty, they also create sellable musical beauty. Suno, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in two thousand twenty-two by four former engineers from Kensho Technologies — Mikey Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg — announced in February of this year that it reached two million paid subscribers and three hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue, and by May was in conversations for a funding round that would value it at more than five billion dollars, double its valuation from last November. Warner Music reached an agreement with the platform; Sony remains in litigation. But two million people pay between ten and thirty dollars a month to create songs that did not exist, with voices no one recorded and arrangements no one composed. Music, which was for centuries the most irrefutably human thing one could do with free time, now carries three hundred million dollars annually in the market for what can be generated in seconds from a text box.