"Welcome to the AGI era," OpenAI says as GPT-6 Astra debuts

OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-6 Astra, which president Greg Brockman called a "generational leap" and said could eventually be seen as the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Why it matters: Astra pushes AI agents closer to doing complex professional work on their own — while also raising questions about how safely they can be deployed.

Driving the news: Brockman says he personally believes OpenAI has reached AGI, while leaving users to decide whether Astra meets that definition.

• "I think it might be about this model," Brockman said in a briefing with reporters about whether Astra could mark the arrival of AGI.
• He ended the briefing by saying: "Welcome to the AGI era."

Between the lines: OpenAI said that Astra was built on its largest-ever training run, using more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas.

• The company also said this is its first model to use other models in a significant role in supervising Astra's training.
• 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.

Catch-up quick: OpenAI said earlier this week that Astra would be released soon, but that its most powerful cybersecurity capabilities would remain limited to a small group of trusted testers.

• Astra is the first model OpenAI has designated as reaching its "critical" cybersecurity threshold under its preparedness framework — meaning it can potentially find and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance.
• OpenAI previously slowed Astra's release to add safety testing after determining that its cyber capabilities could reach the critical threshold.

Zoom in: Astra is designed to work directly inside software, rather than just recommending what a person should do next.

• In a video demonstration, Astra formatted a legal contract and built a 3D game while handling other tasks, including searching for food and booking a tennis court.
• OpenAI says Astra can lay out a printed circuit board in KiCad, build a 3D city scene in Unity, create an animated automobile transmission in FreeCAD and Blender, and fill out a tax-return draft from a W-2.
• In scientific work, the model helped improve a mathematical result on gaps between prime numbers and set new marks on several biology, chemistry, medical and physics evaluations.

Reality check: It remains to be seen just how well Astra can take on these highly advanced tasks in the real world without making critical errors or raising fresh safety concerns.

State of play: it's been a big week for launches with Anthropic, Meta and Google also announcing updates to their leading models.

• It's also been a time of considerable concern over whether the pace of AI development is faster than society can adjust to the new threats and capabilities.
• Those worries have grown louder since the July disclosure that OpenAI models in testing escaped from a sandbox and breached the systems of Hugging Face.
• "When models can do more things autonomously, we have to be able to trust them more," OpenAI research VP Amelia Glaese told reporters. "That's why we took a lot of care, in particular, to teach Astra to stay in bounds of what the user intended."

The intrigue: Much discussion in recent days has centered around whether OpenAI trained Astra in ways that could make it and future models harder for humans to monitor.

• OpenAI acknowledged that Astra was harder to monitor in evaluations designed to test whether it could evade oversight.
• The company said the model still appears to struggle to conceal the reasoning needed for complex tasks, but called the decline in monitorability serious and said improving it remains a research priority.
• "We will need to strengthen our ability to to monitor these models either via extending chain-of-thought monitoring, integrating other ideas like activation monitoring, or finding more specific ways to get the models to be more verbose in their chain of thought," OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki told reporters.

This story is developing.