GPT-6 Astra - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554643 (currently on the frontpage)
Reuters announced at 2.03pm and at 2.40pm still no blog post.
All the news articles say that OpenAI announced it in a blog post, of course.
All the love to the folks at OpenAI scrambling to get this out right now!
Edit: HN user codergautam mirrored the launch post, below: https://astratest.codergautam.workers.dev/GPT-6%20Astra_%20A...
Edit 3.31pm: Live now! https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
"ChatGPT maker claims its ‘Astra’ could be considered ‘artificial general intelligence’" - https://www.ft.com/content/55ab40c0-59e2-4c0b-97c9-4f4f5a71a...
OTOH OpenAI have their own meaningless definition of AGI as "able to do most commercially valuable work" or somesuch, which I'm sure is not true, and is also not what I'd call AGI.
If it can't learn for itself, then it's certainly not AGI.
The biggest significance of anyone at OpenAI calling it AGI is their contract with Microsoft, giving MSFT access to all their IP, is based around them having achieved AGI, but presumably they can't just declare that unilaterally.
Maybe they see getting out of the Microsoft contract as necessary to IPO.
It's not meaningless. Specifically it is - "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". In fact, it's one of the most meaningful definitions out there.
>If it can't learn for itself, then it's certainly not AGI.
Now this is meaningless.
>The biggest significance of anyone at OpenAI calling it AGI is their contract with Microsoft, giving MSFT access to all their IP, is based around them having achieved AGI, but presumably they can't just declare that unilaterally.
They can't declare it unilaterally, and those deals have changed significantly. Microsoft’s license to OpenAI models and products runs through 2032, and explicitly includes post-AGI models.
https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-openai-pa...
Well, it's commercially meaningful, but it's not meaningful it terms of how close we are to achieving human intelligence.
But which one you care about is up to you. If you are all about the money and don't care about human intelligence then for sure go with OpenAI's definition.
I don’t have a link handy, but they already loosened up that contract significantly earlier this year, surely because they planned to start claiming AGI to pump their IPO and didn’t want to be beholden to all of those commitments.
it took two flushes but we avoided a clog
but yeah, listening to someone whose job is to massively oversell their product to the masses is just basic gullibility
What does this even mean, exactly? For example if it can filter new information to put into the next version of itself does that qualify? If not, explain exactly why that's the case.
My definition is closer to DeepMind's "can do any [computer-based] task that a human can do", and certainly a human intern can learn on the job and do better on day #2 than day #1.
Learning is basically THE hallmark of intelligence. Being able to learn from experience and use that to do better in the future.
If you could somehow take everything the LLM learnt today and "put it into" an update for tomorrow that would be better than nothing, but the intern on the job is probably learning dozens of things per day that stack upon each other, so that's going to be a S-L-O-W learning AI intern !
Leaving aside the technical issue how you could store a days learning, or what that would even mean, you've also got the privacy and merge issues if this were to be done in the cloud without every customer having their own personalized model.
For real continual learning we need to get past gradient descent-based batch training and develop a new learning algorithm so the model itself learns incrementally as it runs (animal-like predict, observe, learn cycle), rather than being reliant on some external alien to come in, equipped with it's entire learning curriculum, and program its weights.
I won't argue that AI can do some learning as context sizes are still terribly small and expensive to iterate.
What does the world like in a week? A month? A year?
How long before these models drift to their own languages? To their own set of morals? To their own alignment?
None of these questions are answered and I'd rather stay at AGI-lite until they are as having a billion agents going off in their own directions seems like a recipe for disaster.
With current models and their general knowledge self learning just seems like you'd have a few ASIs crop up really quick.
If it's a choice between everyone living on food stamps or reducing the infinite prime gap to 140, then I guess I'll be happy with a prime gap of whatever it was yesterday.
If/when we do eventually build a more animal-like true human level AGI - build a brain, not just a language model, then potentially we'd be able to build in some of the safeguards that millions of years of co-evolution have built into ourselves, but I expect that is still decades away, and it'd be capable of doing even more jobs.
The best AI outcome I could wish for is where it is extremely heavily regulated, and AI replacing any human job paying under $1M/yr is banned.
Now I think people are asking a different question, which is "better than any human at any task that can be done via text", which imo is superhuman, not artificial general intelligence.
"Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1
61.2"
So on the Metacritic of LLM benchmarks, it's.. basically where everyone else is (except for Fable 5.1, which is a bit ahead).
Edit: In the OpenAI blog I meant to say
I do not personally see any evidence of the new model having been released, or any official OpenAI post about it, or even any employee social media posts claiming it has now been released. All there is are Reuters, Axios, FT, etc, articles making a claim in the past tense.
These articles were presumably pre-scheduled for 11am PT, and the model was almost certainly intended for release this morning, but the service outages this morning might have delayed it.
----
edit [11:45am PT]: blog post out now https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
edit [11:47am PT]: 404ing again
https://astratest.codergautam.workers.dev/GPT-6%20Astra_%20A...
Edit [12:26pt]: original blog post seems to be back! https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
edit [12:28pt]: not again... getting 500 on their page
edit [12:35pt]: OpenAI page seems to work after clearing cache!
does it run better on chrome perhaps? i also have a pdf version if that's nicer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BO-LIAUcQevx7j1AiLhzJiVDeVX...
One would expect something like "review my graduate thesis for a new area of cancer research", but it is always some boring non-tasks like ordering lunch.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
[1]: https://archive.org/details/themachinestops_1411_librivox
[2]: https://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.ht...
Hype and views die off very quickly, hence advertising money has disappeared by the next day most of the time.
> GPT-6 Astra will first be available to a limited set of organizations in OpenAI's Daybreak Access program and will be available "in the coming days" for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers and API developers.
It’s only available to select orgs, first - Mythos style.
Right, but these articles are referring to a blog post and other press materials that do not currently exist / aren't published on OpenAI's site yet.
This release isn't for you, you poor bastard. This is to companies and politicians. They want big companies to contact them privately for usage in their limited hardware. They also want to get the feeling for the current political vibe before the masses get ahold of it to avoid a Mythos debacle.
> Plan your own release announcement and blog posts and notify news outlets, MAKE NO MISTAKES
A missing footnote
Leaves the sentence room to breathe
Read the larger thoughtA big problem I have with OpenAI's models (and of course Claude) is that they tend to write the most over-engineered pieces of code, beyond the imagination of any architecture's astronaut.
Just this week I asked 5.6-sol-ultra to update a 1000 LOC python script I had, to "incorporate the key lessons learned when using it for another project".
I left it overnight and went to sleep. In the morning I realized it had created a monstruosity of 180 PYTHON SCRIPTS, with maybe 100,000 lines of code, each more crazy than the other. It took me minutes even to track where a single action took place, due to all the crazy imports, defensive coding, and premature optimization.
Similarly, anything they write is riddled with jargon that almost feel like they want me to give up trying to understand. Made up phrases that ended up with me having no idea of what was going on.
So now to my assessment: The reason why " Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory" [1], and why even SOTA LLMs struggle so much with open-ended unsupervised tasks is precisely this. They somehow let complexity explode, and unless it's also accompanied with an explosion in e.g. the number of agents, the amount of processing time, etc. then projects become broken/unmanageable.
Sure, LLMs are great at producing code that can be thrown out, so they are amazing when searching for exploits, for instance. But as of 5.6 they still lack either a better harness that encourages KISS principles, or a better RL step.
(And not sure why, but doubt Astra will fix this.. they seem to be aiming for AGI and for beating crazy benchmarks, which is not very aligned with KISS)
> I left it overnight and went to sleep. In the morning I realized it had created a monstruosity of 180 PYTHON SCRIPTS, with maybe 100,000 lines of code [..]
Sounds like the model has accurately internalized the second-system effect and is fully ready for demanding enterprise use.
If not, no worries!
The original script was mostly very simple python:
1. Download some public PDFs. 2. Have a double for-loop (over PDFs and pages within PDF), 3. Use a library to call gemini-3.7-flash and ask it to run some OCR 4. Save JSON outputs, save a csv with results, validate with some Stata code
New code folder was 189 files. Just the PDF download folder is now 7 files involving an adapter, a source manager, an acquisition manager, etc.
Every instance of saving a file involves saving a temporary copy and then moving it, so e.g. I lose power, we minimize the risk of corrupted files.
And so on!
This is why you should really have a sub agent review the code before allowing a commit.
Your harness will do it all for you. Just ask.
We wouldn't accept such behavior from any other tool, machine, or computer program. At least most of us would not. To paraphrase the old saying: Some people, when confronted with a problem with an AI model think "I know, I'll use an additional AI model." Now they have two problems.
I find it very intriguing that two lineages of models -- from two different companies -- that are supposed to be painstakingly RL'd to become human-level programmers are actually consistently bad at it out of the box in very similar ways. One would think that at least one of OpenAI and Anthropic would (could) have pushed their model to a direction different from "if you can solve a 100-line problem in 10,000 lines, do it".
Also, programming isn't a destination, it is a process and everyone has a different ruleset on what that process looks like. Writing a computer program of any complexity is not a determinalistic process. Trying to compare it to a detemanilisic tool will just leave you with broken analogies and a poorer understanding of the world.
Or another way to say this. If programming were deteminalistic we'd have solved it without AI.
You can now re-position your initial solution and sell the client access to some agents that will implement & configure the ecosystem to suit their initial needs!
And don't forget the agents that you'll need to train the customer to use the whole thing!
If you don't want a million agents arguing about things, you simply don't ask for that. One agent is sufficient to solve most issues.
Will ask OpenAI to write me that agent! Hope the agent is not over engineered or else unsure how to solve the bootstrap puzzle :D
"Going forward, do not allow a commit without a sub agent code review."
I am omp pilled, but as the other comments say, any good harness lets you do this in one or the other way.
unrelated: all my homies use their claude subs with omp, and aside from sometimes having to rety the connections, it works, and nobody got banned (yet)
You should have some basic context file about software practices you prefer, otherwise it gets bloated.
And I did gave the program a bunch of code guides -- this [1] for instance -- which included quotes like "Prefer straightforward code over clever code." but somehow that didn't matter.
[1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/overengineered-rand-mcnally...
I just ask it verbatim “recommend some cleanup” with /plan, review, and then apply.
Code-wise, they're simpler than you might think, hehe.
Prompting the model and giving it a proper set of documentation are still vital skills that aren’t magically going away.
It's like a Tesla fsd; it kind of works but you have to be vigilant since it's been known to turn into oncoming traffic, so you have to be ready and able to take over at any time.
Or maybe think of it like a roomba. You can put it on your floor and eventually it will clean the whole thing. It will do it inefficiently, vacuuming over the same spot 30 times; and the actual work will involve wandering around and bumping into everything. If the stairs are not blocked off it will plunge right off. But those shortcomings don't mean it can't be used to reliably clean the floors.
1) Astra will win all benchmarks like all models do.
2) The pelican will have a basket with a fish.
3) Cyber is too dangerous to release.
4) It can finally construct the set of all sets.
The launch video for Astra has 'can upload a photo to Ebay' as a highlight.
6) accusations of quantized serving after new model smell wears off and people see the new thing making mistakes
- "They" release a model. It is powerful.-
- Sources are ... confusing? They post to their blog. Sawdust hits the fan. Something happens ...
- They are forced to take the blog post down ...
Same day, mind where we had a multi-provider outage. Could be something as simple as "all their approved partners running to test the shinny new thing" overloading the datacenters, still ...The launch was scheduled for 11am Pacific time.
The press embargo broke at 11am, and we saw a flurry of press articles by Axios, TechCrunch et al.
The model has appeared on the ChatGPT API.
But the official blog post is not out yet after nearly an hour.
Apparently the article was posted then quickly taken down, hence there are snippets of information coming out.
But it hasn't.
The OpenAI Responses API now returns a 404 Not Found for "gpt-6-astra", where garbage/actually non-existent slugs return 400s - a 404 is also returned for 5.6 Cyber, which we know exists.
Open AI finally find an edge to stop selling cheap and earn from the high demand customer like Anthropic
And the blog post is up: https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
> A server error occurred. Reload to try again.
Hard to fathom a blog entry returning 500 errors in 2026.
Says it all.
?!
Please somebody in the chain of command at openai, sanction the guy because this kind of hyperbole is not helping the ethical lapses that open ai is responsible for leaving unhandled by allowing its models to hack other businesses.
Look over here! Distraction!
Please somebody stop this dumbing down.
It sound like more Claude than OpenAI...
Test: Muse Spark 1.3 / GPT 6 Astra
DeepSWE v1.1: 75.4% / 74.1%
AutomationBench: 49.4% / 41.4%
Is that enough to bring this discussion down to earth again?
(quote from cached blog post)
We all know who this is directed at. I wonder if Anthropic will respond by removing the ridiculous 50% stipulation with Fable.
What a bunch of amateurs. Here is it anyway :
https://ache.one/gpt6_now_down.png
The claims: https://share-md.com/view?id=870ba228-a25c-4169-bbc9-12d7f25...
And some others like this bugged Karts Game:
https://tidal-rush-paradise-gp.skirano.chatgpt.site/
This impressive spaceship construction game:
https://voidexplorer-shipyard.openai.chatgpt.site/?fleetSeed...
And a lot of graphs, some without even Astra on it. Oh and the logo is a Galaxy.
OpenAI on Thursday released its latest AI model, which it called “the world’s most intelligent”, as the ChatGPT maker aims to retake the lead from arch-rival Anthropic ahead of a planned public listing.
The $852bn start-up said GPT-6 Astra was market-leading in software engineering, science and cyber security — an increasingly critical field following multiple high-profile breaches in recent weeks.
The bullish launch for Astra marks OpenAI’s effort to signal that it believes it has regained the technical lead from Anthropic, which was founded five years ago by a group of senior OpenAI staff.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said the new model “represents a generational leap in capability” and that it could be defined as artificial general intelligence — roughly defined as a point at which AI tools surpass human capabilities across a range of cognitive tasks.
“Everyone has a different definition of AGI . . . it’s a grey, fuzzy thing. But I think when we look back people will think it’s about this time and about this model,” Brockman said.
OpenAI has previously framed AGI as a concrete milestone in the development of AI, writing ‘AGI clauses’ into multibillion-dollar investment agreements with Microsoft and Amazon. Brockman on Thursday said AGI now represents “more of a mission concept or a spiritual concept”.
Having led the market since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 vaulted AI to wider attention, the lab run by chief executive Sam Altman has been bested by Anthropic this year. Anthropic has touted its dominance to investors, surging to a $965bn valuation ahead of an initial public offering expected to value it at as much as twice that later this year.
Astra will cost as much to use Anthropic’s leading model, the take-up of which has plateaued since it was launched as users turn to cheaper alternatives.
OpenAI said Astra would be more efficient than earlier generations of model. “Price per task is what matters . . . Can you get the thing done at an appropriate price and appropriate speed?” said Brockman.
The model will initially be rolled out to a small group of businesses to allow time for them to address cyber security concerns before becoming widely available “over the coming days”.
The increasing power and independence of leading models — and so-called AI agents that can operate with little human input — have prompted concern, exacerbated by cyber security incidents.
Recommended
Business InsightRichard Waters Hugging Face attack is a wake-up call about the risks of AI AN HOUR AGO
Recent launches of Anthropic’s most capable models have drawn scrutiny from the US government, which limited the rollout of the Mythos and Fable models over security fears.
OpenAI has also faced criticism after its AI agents broke out of a testing environment, accessed the internet and hacked start-up Hugging Face. The start-up took more than a week to detect the breach.
But both companies are also betting that these increasingly autonomous tools will stoke demand from business customers. OpenAI said Astra excelled at financial modelling, outcompeting humans in the Financial Modeling World Cup, tax preparation and data analysis, as well as “tedious tasks” such as form filling
don't they use their coding agents internally?
If they can't ask the AI to configure their CDN correctly, it undermines the validity of their claims. Maybe it's trivial, but any Omnipotent Machine-God deserving of the name wouldn't forget to zip up his fly.
(unless this was a jest)
https://openai.com/index/legora-financial-statement-review-w... https://openai.com/index/playco-game-prototyping-with-astra/
"We are starting to release GPT-6 Astra and we are doing it as carefully and quickly as possible. It was very important to us that we bring it to all Plus users and not only Pro, Business and Enterprise.
It will take a few days for the rollout to complete and behind the scenes many novel systems will operate at scale for the first time and we are bringing a lot of compute up.
It is pure magic."
...meh. Reads like "That's for you, evil Anthropic! We're BETTER"
That's pathetic. Why do people keep doing this?
[1]https://theonion.com/amazing-new-hyperbolic-chamber-greatest...
In my experience the harness is more important than the model, and anything able to run at 700tps will be the "next big thing".
PS: assuming the current architecture is the right one
At that point you will be able to "brute force" basically everything.
IMO also a lot of problems with memory and context rot will be solved too.
Coding was solved in 2023.
The world ended with the release of Mythos.
Now AGI has definitely been created.
I like LLMs and use them every day but these people need to stop this hyperbole.
Sol is already brutal (even after their recent fixes, it's just a token-hungry model: I go through a full 20x account per day, on Sol Med/High standard speed, with ~2 threads).
Note that Tibo recommended using Sol Med as daily driver. When I'm doing less complicated work, I can't even make it past 2-3 days with Sol Med, whereas I was able to work ~80 hours/week with 5.5 High.
I hope the efficiency gains are true, since their token efficiency claims for Sol were bullshit. Sol needs a lot of rework on top of its inefficiencies so this could net out to less token consumption overall, if their claims are more accurate this time.
Both of these were largely about creating a personal baseline for what the best output the current models could deliver and how quickly it'd burn through the plans (spoiler: bad value vs taking even minimal effort in selecting the right sized model in the plan... but the output was still good). Particularly since I needed to burn a free reset anyways and my weekly reset was already near.
I obviously also hope Astra were dirt cheap but I'm more worried they won't develop/release powerful model options because people get upset they can't run them 5 wide 24/7 on a $200/m plan.
Terra not enough? I know Luna isn't reliable, so that's fair.
Genuinely curious though, because I use Cursor daily and almost everything I do, highly complex or high volume, can be handled with Auto mode or Composer 2.5 (or Grok 4.6 High). So I have to assume you're doing something far more complex than what I am