Co-founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, Singularity University launched in 2009 as a nonprofit housed at the NASA Research Park at Ames, backed by founding partners including Google, Nokia, LinkedIn, and the X Prize Foundation. The premise was seductive: bring together brilliant people, immerse them in exponential technologies, and watch them solve global problems. The flagship offering was a ten-week summer Graduate Studies Program. Google alone contributed $1.5 million annually. The media attention was enormous, and for a time, Singularity University looked like a genuine attempt to institutionalize techno-optimism.

In 2013, the organization incorporated as a for-profit entity, Singularity Education Group, and acquired "Singularity University" as its trade name. The shift generated friction. Faculty members reported frustration with the company's growing focus on revenue over mission. In 2018, Singularity announced a $32 million Series B investment round, but that same year Bloomberg Businessweek published a damaging investigation documenting alleged sexual harassment of a student by a teacher, theft aided by an executive, and systemic discrimination. Google ended its annual grant. The organization moved from NASA Ames to Santa Clara, acquired and then sold the media company Futurism, and cycled through leadership changes. By 2023, Aaron Vaccaro had become president, and the organization was running international summits in Spain, South Africa, Brazil, and India.

In early 2021, as COVID-19 surged across California, Diamandis hosted an in-person conference. Dozens of attendees contracted the virus. MIT Technology Review reported that Diamandis subsequently tried to sell attendees what a Stanford professor of law and medicine called "quackery" -- unproven treatments involving peptides and amniotic fluid. The story was covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. For an organization that claimed to be at the frontier of science, the episode was particularly damaging: it suggested that the futurist mindset could slide from optimism into recklessness, and from innovation into snake oil.

Singularity Group still operates, running executive programs and international summits. Its startup incubator, SU Labs, spawned legitimate companies including the car-sharing service Getaround and the drone logistics company Matternet. But the organization's trajectory reveals something about Silicon Valley's relationship with the idea of disruption: it is easier to promise exponential change than to deliver it, and the language of transformation can become a shield for ordinary corporate dysfunction. The word "university" in the name was always aspirational rather than factual. At its best, Singularity connected ambitious people to powerful ideas. At its worst, it confused ambition with accountability.