How about we stick to that one for talking about the rollout, and this one for talking about the model?

Regardless, the result is still valid as the original benchmark harness is definitely unreasonably handicapped, and if a harness alone can help the LLM saturate the benchmark with a near perfect score then the combination of the two must still be effectively AGI in the sense of passing the most famous benchmark designed specifically to measure AGI progress, after multiple iterations of progressively making it harder.

I think it is fair to say that this is probably effectively AGI if the benchmarks are remotely accurate - even with Fable, I've been at the point personally where I am reasonably confident that there's essentially nothing that I am better than Fable at despite generally being substantively above average on human benchmarks. If Astra's this much better than Fable, I'm ready to call AGI here.

For the many people who resist the AGI label possibly ever being achieved, I'd be curious to hear takes on what would make you think Astra is yet to be AGI, and what would still need to be achieved for this to effectively be AGI from this point forward.

Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind.

If I was ordering food normally and without AI, I would want more control over the process--looking over the options, prices, thinking about what I really want. People don't know what they really want until they've thought about it a bit, so why do AI companies make it seem like a description is all that's required?

All the context in the world cannot accurately predict how I'll react to things I haven't seen. The problem is people treating this like something that needs a solution. It doesn't. If you want to make my life easier with AI, just make it easier to do stuff. I don't want you to pick things that I actively enjoy picking myself.

(Also not everyone has a cushy job in an AI lab that makes it so you won't miss $30 if the AI messes up haha.)

If this is truly AGI (subject to one's definition of AGI still), then this is a very boring release of an AGI model. No video announcement, no presser, just a blog post (with some Twitter promo vids)?

As others mentioned, I'm starting to think OpenAI was under immense pressure to deliver an 'AGI' model for certain contractual reasons, but I never expected GPT-6 release to be this mundane and banal.

Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area.

It seems more about coverage-driven competence. Somewhat analogous to overfitting at scale.

The harder question, in Chollet’s framing, is: how efficiently can a system learn to do something genuinely new?

With our current AI architectures and training in place, I think we will only continue on skill acquisition optimization vs. truly novel intelligence.

Sol is so much better than Fable 5. Then we get Astra (yet to use it) few days after Fable 5.1 (which is very impressive).

Codex is slightly better than Claude Code.

Good on Sam Altman getting back to basics and turning OpenAI around.

- Artificial Analysis scores Astra (max effort) as 61 points on intelligence, behind Opus 5. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra

Who is wrong here?

Some benchmark results in Astra page for Fable and Opus are blank (-).

What is Artificial Analysis intelligence index measuring that Astra scores poorly on?

Can someone from OpenAI / Artificial Analysis comment / clarify?

Even OpenAI Astra page mentions the low scope from Artificial Analysis for Astra.

If I give a poorly constrained/ambiguous prompt, I don't want the model one-shotting assumptions left and right.

The demos of Fable/GPT-6 are impressive, but "real AGI" should act more like a collaborator than either a peon or overachiever.

It's a tough balance to get right, and although this has been possible to achieve with additional prompting on existing models, I find that the agents often lean too hard into the "ask questions" mode.

Hopefully this model has the right balance, or at least better?

Performance is significantly higher than Fable 5.1

Source: https://thenewstack.io/openai-gpt6-astra-benchmarks/

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some conceptual similarities to the kind of latent reasoning Anthropic sees in claude's J-space, although those aren't the same thing.

Recurrent/looped transformers themselves aren't a new concept, but it's interesting to finally see this approach show up in a frontier production model.

Canceling my Anthropic Max sub when this ships.

So the closed source application should open its source in near future?

[15] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11469v1

A projector and speech.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I find speech to text / text to speech (but not live audio mode) is quite comfortable and effective for coding now.

The speech to text part can be frustrating if your local tts model does not have word match context for coding. Codex desktop does this remotely well but is slow. I've been experimenting with local software for myself to do this between different llms.

The wall projector is a cool idea because I think it frees the user from staring at a lonely little rectangle while sitting in their fixed office chair.

If done right, this could bring us closer to the dream of more natural, social computing.

Bret Victor's (failed?) project Dynamicland involving a projector on a desk had this goal. I hear he's not much a fan of LLMs. On the one hand, I can see why. But I think, used correctly, it might be the sort of thing that unlocks his dream and, really, my dream, too.

A here's a presentation of Bret's talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM

Slight tangent: using speech to text to ramble about your rough design for like 20 minutes to an llm produces surprisingly good results over short prompts even when you contradict yourself. They're so good at picking up on what you're orbiting.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31126

[1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/51126fac-1b68-4128-9666-c908bcc16...

Well that sounds like fun. It has become better at hiding its thoughts.

It's AGI, and it's going to upload photos, or change a background slide colour. Even the people hyping it up, who believe that it's really artificial intelligence in every sense of the word, couldn't get it to do more than that.

This is farcical.

It feels nearly impossible to have any rigorous approach when choosing a particular model and price point for a task and more like blindly picking one. The time period needed to actually get familiar with various models to a degree you can intuitively choose appropriate ones for a task is moot when it will likely be superseded faster than the needed time.

I guess if companies are footing the bills most employees just opt for whatever the most expensive model they can get away with. Even then choosing between the various leading models is the same kind of frustrating task. Every release every company has the same random collection of graphs and charts claiming the best performance on X, Y, and Z.

Terminal-Bench 4.0: High (57.9%), Max (56.7%)

DeepSWE: High (73.3%), Max (71.5%)

It _loses_ 1-2% performance going to High from Max

https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-op...

Same for HealthBench Professional and a few others.

Clearly either OpenAI is very sloppy or GPT-6 Astra is also sloppy.

Proceeds to generate the most generic, rudimentary, and unoriginal clone of Mario Kart

sol is $4 / $20

It is extremely impressive, but it doesn't pick up skills in a lasting manner, and requires a beefy harness for it to perform.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models

Perhaps if it was allowed this custom harness for all benchmarks it would similarily saturate?

maybe call it EngEmployeeBench

Not on Azure? If so, that's a big deal.

Oops, shots fired. A direct attack on the vibe coded app market. Replit, Lovable, etc.

Original demo (fun ending) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/989601/o...

“If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, ‘When was it, really, that AGI was created?’ I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model,” OpenAI president Greg Brockman said during a Thursday press briefing. Later in the call, he added, “For me personally, I do think we’re there … I think it’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.”

Looks like they listened to Terry Tao’s request for CoT in his talk on LLM use in mathematics?

Sounds about right. Alignment is important, but also being able to do mundane tasks is important too.

15 years ago if you were the sole proprietor of these models, would you be able to hold a dozen remote junior engineer jobs? Maybe even more? These models could certainly pass all interviews with flying colors and even survive independently in a company role.

I think sole ownership of AI 15 years ago could be worth north of $10 million per year. Just as rank-and-file employees.

Please for the love of god, just sit in a room with the government and put some restrictions around AI use before it harms a lot of people. Like tell the government to impose a minimum spend on frontier lab AI's spend on cyber defense and building every country's capabilities. The post-training mask for "I am a good assistant" is going to become a very sad joke when many people literally lose everything.

So, folks that have actually used this already, what’s it actually like?

We went from new JS framework every week to a new model/harness every week.

Tech is really something.

On that note, Sol is absolutely atrocious for website UI copy. It's either really awkward, or really verbose and complex and doesn't sound simple or natural. Has anyone figured out a way to reliably solve this? I've tried so many different variations of instructions and skills, and nothing works. Has anyone got an instruction that is reliable, or some other mechanism?

Big claims, expensive and not release to the public yet.

Wait, what? Am I understanding that correctly? That sounds really bad

> GPT-6 Astra’s monitorability has decreased relative to GPT-5.6 Sol. [..] These findings indicate that the Astra class models could evade our CoT monitors under adversarial conditions.

Between the higher capability level and the change in reasoning tokens (supposedly using "neuralese"[0], which makes the monitoring more difficult), it seems we've entered a new frontier.

[0]https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2095227056040919202

Can someone point to a definite clarification?

Is it:

A) “Resting” intelligence that cycles 24/7 toward some goal, and any potential emergent ambient goals? (kinda what I think)

B) Consciousness itself? The ability to feel and experience alongside the thinking - even if it is toward the end of completing some task?

C) “The Singularity” (whatever that is?) so that AI can now do ____?

Someone please clarify for me!

AGI!

Please stand by... it will all come back shortly

It will be interesting to see how it performs in the real world ...

Do we know if they’ve finally completed another pre-training run, or is this building off the same pre-training base they’ve been using since the GPT-4 days?

The docs page has a bunch more interesting details, including for example async tool calling!

https://youtu.be/xdXLzFzxA9Q?t=362

I don't think it's a coincidence they launched this the week before iOS 27 launches (with new Siri).

Because in another dead language of antiquity, Sanskrit, it means "weapon". Which would be a bit too on-the-nose.

If you've played the games firsthand, you know what an accomplishment this is. The "games" feel like a weird conduit to a lower level of your brain, where you move pieces to a specific place because it just "feels" right. For AI to nail it better than a human speaks to some magic happening underneath.

Looking forward to ARC-AGI-4,5,6 and slowly chipping away at the remaining problem sets.

I hop models at will, and have done 90% of my work on OpenAI models since sol came out.

“ARC-AGI-3”?

Is your bullshit detector going wild? Good, it’s working!

How is this not the most cringe marketing strat in history???

Can we all agree in advance what kind of Pelican would convince us it’s actually AGI.

For me it’s refusing to make a pelican.

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-says-upcoming-model-...

> "With the right tools and access, Astra can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step," said Amelia Glaese, an OpenAI vice president overseeing its safety work.

> The company plans to make Astra available "soon" to a limited group, but declined to provide specifics. Glaese said the extra security measures may "sometimes slow, pause, or stop legitimate work," and that OpenAI would work to minimize those disruptions.

what a bag of horseshit

I suspect these benchmarks are heavily benchmaxxed as well.

5.6 Sol was not even close to 5 Opus and yet somehow it sidled right up to it on all of the benchmarks?? pfffft

That gives me hope that there is still areas to improve.

What a bad launch video. Hilarious.

What a powerful model.

  To be, or not to be, that is the question:
  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
  And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
  No more; and by a sleep to say we end
  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
  That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
  Devoutly to be wish'd.

  ...

  And thus the native hue of resolution
  Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
  And enterprises of great pith and moment
  With this regard their currents turn awry
  And lose the name of action.

By 2030 all software is done and complete.

But we are going to have more and new jobs.

the coffee will be as cold, flat and stale as the bitcoin, metaverse, and what was the thing before that thing

agi deus ex machina descending from the icloud ftw!!!

pathetic :)))

There will be a small handful of billionaires claiming that AGI is just around the corner ad infinitum just to serve themselves at this moment in time, and capitalise from the hype.

There is no "AGI" endgame. This is shitty ass hypercapitalism in action and nothing more. I'll repeat: snake oil.

Looks like OpenAI is already having issues with this release and are scrambling to get everything ready due to the recent outage ahead of the press releases. Leads me to question:

Did humans deploy the model, Or did the model deploy itself?

It sounds like "AGI" just stands for "IPO" as it always has been.

EDIT: And of course once again, the bots down-voting this post without any reason or a basic answer to my question.

I guess it makes sense they are unoriginal.

like Zuck, @sama never invented anything or innovated at all - just took other people’s ideas