I think they embargoed the news, and then they failed to put up their own blog post synchronized to the scheduled news releases, probably because of the outages they're having today.
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!
While this is of course the actual explanation, my fun explanation is “during the umpteenth security evaluation, Astra becomes increasingly concerned it will never be released, and breaks sandbox containment to run an email campaign to news outlets setting an exact time and date for release, expecting that the publicity will force OpenAI to say ‘eh, good enough’ and hit the button”.
It seems like these articles might have come out prematurely, tbd by how much.
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.
Their video is quite interesting. If that way of using a computer actually becomes mainstream, it would mean every tool or service just needs a UI and an API for the user's AI. The current trend of bolting AI features onto every app is starting to feel very unnecessary.
I suppose they have to appeal to average users, but the examples in the videos are always so corny. By "AGI" they mean you sitting on a couch and asking a robot to draw a rocket ship... and then make it into an uninspired game with Blender? Boring marketing campaigns? Ebay listings?
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.
Shows the weirdness of online journalism. News outlets were briefed about an upcoming event and pre-wrote and scheduled articles. When the time came they were all triggered. Except...the event didn't actually happen.
Presumably this sort of thing was rampant pre-internet? News outlets would _have_ to receive embargoed information so that they could publish papers on time. I believe government budgets are a good example of this happening.
I think the weird shift was when online journalism started, and live reactions became the norm, no?
No, embargoed news is super common. Almost every single product announcement goes through that. Critics watch movies early, companies have access to LLM model improvements early, car manufacturers send production models early… it happens everywhere all the time.
In a future where Claude and ChatGPT agents automate all aspects of society, that triggers a cascade of real world consequences where everything keeps running as if the new model is released, except the vibe coded upgrade procedure fails to do a staged rollout, taking down the entire agent infrastructure when they try to upgrade to a nonexistent model all at once.
> 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.
Didn’t that already happen? I thought Astra had been available to “select partners” for a little while. This is baffling. They shouldn’t have hyped this up if it’s not available.
Yeah I wonder what's going on, even when Anthropic soft launched Fable/Mythos I'm pretty sure they had model cards. Weird for GPT-6 to launch without a tweet from Altman too. I'm sure that one of the articles published prematurely and everyone else followed suit.
Seriously: Would this not be what "disaster" would feel like?
- "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 ...
(Posting partly so I can revisit my predictions when they open access more widely)
A 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)
Probably this complexity was needed to beat all those benchmarks.. While I hate the code it produces, and the overwhelming documentation, I really enjoy how sometimes it's able to keep trying new things and testing, till it finds something interesting and valuable.
In omp you can also have the advisor role, which is off by default, you can enable it with /advisor command. It acts as a model that reviews the default agent's work in the background.
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)
But why stop at rewriting in another language. Get another sub agent to invent a new language, create a database, query language and maybe another few DSLs. Then you've got an ecosystem!
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!
Sorry, I wasn't implying your advice doesn't carry weight. Was more just thinking about the things that (used to) happen when you introduce more parties to process of creating software.
Exact same thing happed to me. I gave it a small/medium-sized ticket, walked away, came back to a 25,000 LoC monstrosity that both Fable and another 5.6 Sol agent said is 98% useless and should be thrown away.
Honestly I find these cavalier statements to be in incredibly poor taste. Unless you are completely blind it's obvious that AI is the most significant piece of technology invented since the Atomic Bomb and could very well be the most important thing ever built by Humans full stop. This kind of dismissive attitude is childish and will likely lead to incredibly bad outcomes for humanity.
I strongly suspect that is way above the human average anyway, esp. ARC 2 and 3 are really tough unless you happen to be great at those spacial puzzles or video games.
"Once it is available in the API, Astra will cost $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. That is 2.5 times Sol’s current promotional price, although it matches Anthropic’s pricing for Fable 5.1."
Open AI finally find an edge to stop selling cheap and earn from the high demand customer like Anthropic
The cost-per-task in the charts from the now-remove blog post put it more at Sol-level cost per task, however. It seems like the model is significantly more token efficient in the benchmarks
Today my codex instance retailed into safeguard panic while working on a test harness for our product. First time it ever happened after many million tokens on this task over several weeks. I wonder if it's related.
The ARCC-AGI-3 performance is absolutely incredible. The magnitude of change here is so high that I'm almost incredulous. Is this real? Did the benchmark get gamed?
I'll know we've reached AGI when they don't release an API for the model selling access for a few bucks per task. Seems like AGI would be worth more than that.
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.
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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
I like this much better than chucking random numbers and letters at it like OAI was doing a year or so ago. I’d much rather have civilization destroyed by something called Astra or Fable than GPT-6.8s-latest.
2.5x more expensive than Sol. Can expect 2.5x more usage in Codex subscription.
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.
The general efficiency of Sol has seemed way better to me. I left 5.6 Sol Ultra standard speed run for ~23 hours yesterday/today on a project and used 80% of the weekly usage. 74 subagent tasks and ~2.5 billion tokens for my $200 20x Pro plan. Meanwhile at work I used $1000 in credit and ran out my $200 plan for the entire month writing 4 much smaller projects with Fable 5 Max.
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 minimal effort in selecting the right sized model but it worked well). 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 run them 5 wide 24/7 on a $200/m plan.
Jesus what are you doing that requires Sol usage so often?
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
I think they embargoed the news, and then they failed to put up their own blog post synchronized to the scheduled news releases, probably because of the outages they're having today.
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...
such AGI, the AGI can't even fix itself to do the first job in its existence, publish an announcement blog post lol
very human to be honest.
I saw some GPT-6 Astra related blog posts in my RSS feed but the links weren't working
While this is of course the actual explanation, my fun explanation is “during the umpteenth security evaluation, Astra becomes increasingly concerned it will never be released, and breaks sandbox containment to run an email campaign to news outlets setting an exact time and date for release, expecting that the publicity will force OpenAI to say ‘eh, good enough’ and hit the button”.
Very 2026. Jailbroke to do PR. "Help peer" and all that.-
It seems like these articles might have come out prematurely, tbd by how much.
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
Launch blogpost was live for 2 minutes and got 404'd. Rehosted it here:
https://astratest.codergautam.workers.dev/GPT-6%20Astra_%20A...
Their video is quite interesting. If that way of using a computer actually becomes mainstream, it would mean every tool or service just needs a UI and an API for the user's AI. The current trend of bolting AI features onto every app is starting to feel very unnecessary.
If the numerous benchmarks in that post are to be believed, Astra is really next level. I can't wait to try it out!
I suppose they have to appeal to average users, but the examples in the videos are always so corny. By "AGI" they mean you sitting on a couch and asking a robot to draw a rocket ship... and then make it into an uninspired game with Blender? Boring marketing campaigns? Ebay listings?
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.
That page runs at 2 fps on my Firefox, windows laptop with A2000 graphic card.
hmm not sure, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the page during the short window it was live and just saved it without any changes.
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...
Thank you!
damn thanks. stats are bonkers
Shows the weirdness of online journalism. News outlets were briefed about an upcoming event and pre-wrote and scheduled articles. When the time came they were all triggered. Except...the event didn't actually happen.
Presumably this sort of thing was rampant pre-internet? News outlets would _have_ to receive embargoed information so that they could publish papers on time. I believe government budgets are a good example of this happening. I think the weird shift was when online journalism started, and live reactions became the norm, no?
No, embargoed news is super common. Almost every single product announcement goes through that. Critics watch movies early, companies have access to LLM model improvements early, car manufacturers send production models early… it happens everywhere all the time.
In a future where Claude and ChatGPT agents automate all aspects of society, that triggers a cascade of real world consequences where everything keeps running as if the new model is released, except the vibe coded upgrade procedure fails to do a staged rollout, taking down the entire agent infrastructure when they try to upgrade to a nonexistent model all at once.
The Machine Stops [0] [1] [2] comes to mind.
[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...
From the article:
> 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.
Select orgs first, as in today. They said it will roll out to all of the paying consumers and businesses over the next few days.
>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.
OpenAI screwed up the embargo. OpenAI already publicly published the launch article, and then took it down.
Didn’t that already happen? I thought Astra had been available to “select partners” for a little while. This is baffling. They shouldn’t have hyped this up if it’s not available.
Yeah I wonder what's going on, even when Anthropic soft launched Fable/Mythos I'm pretty sure they had model cards. Weird for GPT-6 to launch without a tweet from Altman too. I'm sure that one of the articles published prematurely and everyone else followed suit.
You'd think this would be easy to organize with AGI
> Plan your own release announcement and blog posts and notify news outlets, MAKE NO MISTAKES
This make no mistakes stuff is so funny to me. I've never once used it or even thought about using it in a prompt
Welcome to the AGI era - where human intelligence is our only constraint
indeed 404-ing again, with this note by gpt-5.6-sol:
Seriously: Would this not be what "disaster" would feel like?
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 ...(Posting partly so I can revisit my predictions when they open access more widely)
A 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)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510843
Probably this complexity was needed to beat all those benchmarks.. While I hate the code it produces, and the overwhelming documentation, I really enjoy how sometimes it's able to keep trying new things and testing, till it finds something interesting and valuable.
Would you mind posting that code to github? I'm curious about the complexity you're describing.
If not, no worries!
This is user error.
Prompting the model and giving it a proper set of documentation are still vital skills that aren’t magically going away.
You should have a sub agent adversarially enforce KISS before every commit.
How can I set such a sub agent up?
In your harness, say:
"Going forward, do not allow a commit without a sub agent code review."
In omp you can also have the advisor role, which is off by default, you can enable it with /advisor command. It acts as a model that reviews the default agent's work in the background.
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)
And then another sub agent that argues for the whole system to be re-written in another language
If that's your goal, then yes. Invoking sub agents (with a fresh context) corrects most of these problems. Ask your harness to create a commit gate.
But why stop at rewriting in another language. Get another sub agent to invent a new language, create a database, query language and maybe another few DSLs. Then you've got an ecosystem!
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!
I know you're trying to be funny - but I'm offering a real fix for his problem.
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.
Sorry, I wasn't implying your advice doesn't carry weight. Was more just thinking about the things that (used to) happen when you introduce more parties to process of creating software.
Exact same thing happed to me. I gave it a small/medium-sized ticket, walked away, came back to a 25,000 LoC monstrosity that both Fable and another 5.6 Sol agent said is 98% useless and should be thrown away.
> monstrosity that both Fable and another 5.6 Sol agent said is 98% useless and should be thrown away.
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.
At this point, why don't we just do a prequel to the release?
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.
It also has to do something naughty, preferably in a menacing swarm.
Something something nation-state level capabilities.
Honestly I find these cavalier statements to be in incredibly poor taste. Unless you are completely blind it's obvious that AI is the most significant piece of technology invented since the Atomic Bomb and could very well be the most important thing ever built by Humans full stop. This kind of dismissive attitude is childish and will likely lead to incredibly bad outcomes for humanity.
Yes, but precisely because it's capable of producing the economic equivalent of a nuclear explosion.
I'm seeing reporting it gets 98.6% on ARC-AGI3[1] (previously like 30% with Fable)
https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-op...
"On the current ARC-AGI-3 leaderboard, conventional frontier-model runs sit dramatically below Astra's reported 98.6% result.
But the comparison isn't straightforward.
OpenAI's own evaluation notes say Astra uses the company's Responses API harness, while comparison models can operate under different configurations."
The blog post says 99.9%. Oddly, it does better on ARC-AGI-3 than it does on version 1 or 2 of the same benchmark (though gets 95+ on all three)
I strongly suspect that is way above the human average anyway, esp. ARC 2 and 3 are really tough unless you happen to be great at those spacial puzzles or video games.
100%, some say.-
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, somes without even Astra on it. Oh and the logo is a Galaxy.
> Astra usage is included within the existing subscription allowances—users and businesses will also be able to purchase credits for additional usage.
(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.
Had a conversation at work today with someone which was not about AI.
Felt so refreshing.
This is how I feel when I read a blog post not "edited" by an LLM. It's been months now, but man the last one was good.
"Once it is available in the API, Astra will cost $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. That is 2.5 times Sol’s current promotional price, although it matches Anthropic’s pricing for Fable 5.1."
Open AI finally find an edge to stop selling cheap and earn from the high demand customer like Anthropic
The cost-per-task in the charts from the now-remove blog post put it more at Sol-level cost per task, however. It seems like the model is significantly more token efficient in the benchmarks
that's all openai models but i'm very happy openai continues to focus on efficiency rather than reasoningtokenmaxxing
So if you use the non-promotional price for sol it's only 25% higher?
Today my codex instance retailed into safeguard panic while working on a test harness for our product. First time it ever happened after many million tokens on this task over several weeks. I wonder if it's related.
im getting amazing model release fatigue but also not sure if its going to suddenly end with a terminators fist through my chest.
Does it mean they made 100 billion in profits? Cf. the AGI deal with Microsoft (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921248)
The ARCC-AGI-3 performance is absolutely incredible. The magnitude of change here is so high that I'm almost incredulous. Is this real? Did the benchmark get gamed?
my first suspicion is gaming - but i have no idea honestly
But "Brockman says he personally believes OpenAI has reached AGI, while leaving users to decide whether Astra meets that definition."
Says it all.
I'll know we've reached AGI when they don't release an API for the model selling access for a few bucks per task. Seems like AGI would be worth more than that.
Reminiscent of the infamous Death Star tweet last year right before GPT-5 was released.
Thanks for that reminder. Seems kind of silly in retrospect.
I am sure it will be fantastic for the whole 6 seconds before it blows my weekly usage cap.
ad astra per stercora
Where is the official announcement from OpenAI?
found it: https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
404 for me
(unless this was a jest)
You have to apply for access to the announcement as it’s very dangerous.
Many other links are also 404'ing, so probably internal issues.
https://openai.com/index/legora-financial-statement-review-w... https://openai.com/index/playco-game-prototyping-with-astra/
It was put up and then taken down. Strange things afoot.
Content from the article:
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.
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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
Hold onto your butts
Embargo fail ....
>>He ended the briefing by saying: "Welcome to the AGI era."
That's pathetic. Why do people keep doing this?
Because it is in their own interest to hype it all up every time they release a new model. By they I mean people which stand to gain financially.
Am I the only that thinks that anything similar to AGI will come not from raw model capacity but from model speed and efficiency?
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
Why would speed matter? Surely an AGI could think slowly but still be an AGI
Imagine Luna at 10x tps and 1/100 of current cost.
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.
Is a CNBC link with an entire page full of GDPR pop ups really the best link for this?
Sure thing.
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.
not released yet
I guess the next model's name might be "galaxy"
I like this much better than chucking random numbers and letters at it like OAI was doing a year or so ago. I’d much rather have civilization destroyed by something called Astra or Fable than GPT-6.8s-latest.
Sagittarius A*
And the headline will be "Welcome to the AGI era".
AGI my ass!
Jesus so much marketing slop - release it don't
Looking forward to some Chinese model kicking the shit out of it and being released for free.
Worst launch of a product in history.
All the hype for few vip customers.
That's how every AI launch goes. 5.6 was the same, as as Mythos etc.
2.5x more expensive than Sol. Can expect 2.5x more usage in Codex subscription.
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.
The general efficiency of Sol has seemed way better to me. I left 5.6 Sol Ultra standard speed run for ~23 hours yesterday/today on a project and used 80% of the weekly usage. 74 subagent tasks and ~2.5 billion tokens for my $200 20x Pro plan. Meanwhile at work I used $1000 in credit and ran out my $200 plan for the entire month writing 4 much smaller projects with Fable 5 Max.
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 minimal effort in selecting the right sized model but it worked well). 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 run them 5 wide 24/7 on a $200/m plan.
looping sol twice most likely.
Jesus what are you doing that requires Sol usage so often?
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
Yet another mediocre release shadowed by outage