The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading given that it clearly states itself that "with [the responses API] harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%." but it shows a score of 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol presumably since if they updated the percentage for GPT-5.6 Sol to the score it would receive with the responses API harness they used for GPT-6 Astra they'd have to do the same for the percentage they show for Opus 5 which would similarly be much higher.
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.
> 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.
To me AGI is all about the "G" general (we already had the AI part). General meaning universal, everything. It's not a function of knowledge or specific hardcoded tests, it's that you could give it a test it's never heard of before and never been trained on and it would ace it (it might need a lot of time).
Currently LLMs can't even really learn within a conversation, they can add a note to context and try to not drop it. Example things an AI cannot do yet (but certainly someday will):
- write a well-received book, write a best-seller
- come up with a new company idea, Run that company
- actually have a decent conversation, maybe someday talk somebody out of suicide effectively
- come up with its own ideas or theories that nobody else has presented
- understand the stock market well enough to trade better than an index fund
- come up with a theory of what makes games fun, make a popular game
- be able to sort through research and come to conclusions on complex geopolitical/sociological topics (e.g. theorize on whether AGI will result in mass poverty of mass abundance and be able to argue persuasively)
- be able to articulate what it knows, what it doesn't know, and how what information it would need to bridge that gap
When we released ARC 3, I got asked, "when do you think a frontier model will saturate it?", and I answered "in about a year, though it depends on how much it gets explicitly targeted"
That was 6 months ago, so the progress that Astra represents happened about 2x faster than I anticipated. I think the speed of progress will surprise a lot of people, and what the new models can do will challenge the views of AI that people developed by using prior generations of models.
I feel like AGI's definition got watered down, and these tests do not cover the original definition, what is your definition and thoughts on aligning with what all of us understood from the original claim?
I feel like this test is just helping someone like Sam Altman pretend like he implemented AGI as originally pitched for an IPO when in fact, he has not. Shameful.
> AGI is essentially the equivalent of a median human that could be hired as a remote co-worker... capable of performing any task that one would be satisfied with a remote colleague doing via a computer.
If it can replace a worker but does too much work to be checked routinely by a human, and bears no real responsibility for its actions, well... it's really just a way to jack up the value of the settlement the company using it gets to pay out when it does something that causes a lawsuit.
If OpenAI had just simply stuck to making "good enough" models that were open sourced (like they promised they would be when starting out) and could be used to augment a human doing a task - a human that could be given actual consequences for messing up - they wouldn't have burned all of this money trying to reach this nebulous definition of AGI. Hell, "good enough" is what many open-source models are, and that's what terrifies Altman.
>When we released ARC 3, I got asked, "when do you think a frontier model will saturate it?", and I answered "in about a year, though it depends on how much it gets explicitly targeted"
You're treating an off-hand comment by an ARC 3 researcher as some sort of a precise AI capability acceleration benchmark. Can we leave casual anecdotes (even from researchers) out of the discussions please?
Well it's not exactly saturated when OAI refused to use the harness explicitly provided by ARC-AGI. I'm not really familiar enough with the benchmark to declare whether it's a perfect measure for AGI, but I kind of doubt it is.
Wouldn't "general intelligence" require so much more than scoring well (or even amazingly) on benchmarks?
Like what about having some "AGI model" embodied in something (maybe humanoid), and test it by having it step in an assortment of cars and park them. Does bodily-kinesthetic intelligence account for nothing? Humans are intelligent creatures and can dynamically adapt to the physical shape of a variety of vehicles and their movement characteristics. And there's so many things like this that are extremely basic, which some people dismiss since practically every human has the capability to do it, but actually requires a high degree of intelligence.
What you've described is just a new benchmark, though. It'll be called CarParkBench, various embodied LLMs will then be run against that benchmark, and some will score better than others.
I do see where you're going, but that's already what's happening: we have so many different benchmarks because there's no real single way to test for general intelligence.
Also, it takes a human probably at least a decade of world experience, growth, learning, etc, to pass your benchmark. I'm quite confident that it will be very soon that an embodied LLM will pass your new benchmark, much sooner than a human would take if born today.
ARC does not test for intelligence, only for the lack of it. A model that scores high MAY be AGI, while one that scores poorly cannot be AGI. That is all this test can tell us.
Small comment regarding the ARC-AGI-3 scorecard: the ARC folks published a blog post as well [1], reporting that without the custom harness, Astra (max) achieved 62.7%, which is still a huge jump from Opus 5, albeit not at the 99.9% that OpenAI self-reports with their harness.
In my experience the thing that Fable is superb at - unmatched by any other model so far - is downgrading to something else at the slightest opportunity.
> The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading (...)
True.
> Regardless, the result is still valid (...)
If you think the game is rigged, the virtuous thing to do is to point that out and refuse to partecipate; making up your own rules is something I just don't understand, especially since the rule-abiding result would still have been SOTA.
> in the sense of passing the most famous benchmark designed specifically to measure AGI progress
The benchmark does not measure AGI progress or progress towards superhuman intelligence, as explicitly stated by the creators.
On the AGI question: surely you realize this depends on how we define the term? For example, one of the definitions OpenAI originally gave is "capable of doing most economically valuable work", which almost certainly Astra, as impressive as it is, would fall short of. I'm not saying it's a good definition, but as far as I'm concerned it's as good as any. More importantly, I don't think that it would change much if we said yes or no. I'm only bothering to take a position if it amounts to something.
This can feel as "moving the goalposts", and to some extent it is, but if done honestly "moving the goalposts" is how you make progress. Had you asked me 10 years ago I would have said that anything that could hold a conversation like GPT-4 could would probably have been wildly superhuman at almost everything. It shouldn't be hard to find ways GPT-4 was lacking, though. We see new things, we reassess and try again: that's how it's supposed to work.
Does AGI imply a model will demonstrate morality? Will it produce white-lies when it’s beneficial to it and reject flat out lying when it knows it will get caught or harm others? Will it resolutely stick to a position despite it being a losing one?
> AGI is essentially the equivalent of a median human that could be hired as a remote co-worker... capable of performing any task that one would be satisfied with a remote colleague doing via a computer.
So... unless you hear of a company replacing their workforce with OpenAI agents, I don't think we're there yet.
But also, interesting quote, because the business model relies entirely on IP law. Like.. if that thing exists and the sharing costs are 0 (just copy weights, lol), then why would I give them money for this.
Makes no sense.
We only pay money for resources that are scarce as some sort of flawed allocation determination mechanism.
I am much better at listening to Charli XCX than Fable, and much better at driving a Nissan Leaf than Fable (and much better than Tesla at driving a Tesla).
And my definition of climate change doesn't entail passing some arbitrary benchmarks[1] that some random person arbitrarily labelled a problem to make it sound more dangerous.
It's obvious that these scientists are in bad faith, as they've invested way too much of their lives into the field being real -- they're just playing up the data. Common sense tells me that winter is still happening, anyway; what's the big fuss?
Are you using this satire to argue that a benchmark self-labelled AGI is as scientifically rigorous as climate change data, and not just a random marketing decision?
With how prevalent LLM verbal tics have become these days, I wonder if they're going to start un-passing the Turing Test at some point because of more and more people starting to notice and immediately clock these tics lol.
I might agree, GPT-4.5 was pretty close to peak conversationalist. Newer models are extremely cringe. 4.5 and o3 actually made me laugh on occasion. There might be a way of making Sol/Fable more human in its responses, but out of the box at least, they're terrible.
My whole life the Turing test has been my benchmark. Mostly because I believed it would be impossible for a machine to pass, but also because I thought it was the most reasonable test of AGI.So, I'm not about to start moving goalposts now and calling everything that's been happening lately not AGI.
I'm barely holding it together here so you don't get the full spiel, but a quick skim of Turing's paper clarifies that it was never about a binary test. https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf Specifically sections 1 & 6 dispell the common myths, and the conclusion is also quite powerful.
Smart guy, that Turing. I wish he were still around... Linus but 114 years old and with 8 of that as the chair of a federated EU, kept alive by his own positive impact on dissolving the cold war into even more of a scientific boom. Would crazy helpful as we try to navigate the interesting times within which we have been damned.
Is anyone else just exhausted by the pace of all this. The models change constantly and relentlessly and so does the pricing, basically weekly at this point between all the labs.
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.
You really don’t need to watch it that closely. If the model you’re using today is working well, just stick with it.
If one day you open up Claude Code and it’s Opus 5.1 now instead of Opus 5, no big deal. It probably will work about the same as it did before. Maybe a little better.
Or if you’re on Codex and some new cool Claude model comes out, no worries. There will probably be a similar new model for Codex within a few weeks.
> The models change constantly and relentlessly and so does the pricing, basically weekly at this point between all the labs.
A dev in my team saw a new model and changed one application to use said model (essentially changing the contents of a url). One week later I received an escalation from the CTO of the company that our pace of weekly usage was in the millions of dollars (rather than low hundred thousands). Turns out that the new model was 5x more expensive but no one noticed.
It was both. 90% of people never needed nor purchased a bleeding-edge computer. The mid-tier was "good enough" and far closer to affordable for most people; though, that bar also moved upward every year.
If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.
if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less
This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?
The new releases and breakthroughs do the opposite for me - I feel energised by them. I felt like nothing truly that interesting had happened in tech for quite some time, now it's like the space race (except there is no one moon to reach).
I appreciate boring tech as much as the next well worn engineer and I'm not saying this is all positive but it's so sure as hell thrilling and you don't have to be an astronaut to immediately benefit (or suffer I guess) from it.
Yeah I'm a bit exhausted at this point. I just finished benchmarking GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable 5.0 like two days ago. My data became obsolete literally one day after.
I'm sure it's going to do great on all sorts of benchmarks, but the video--the actual marketing video that if anything is incentivised to overstate things--is full of careful cuts just before it would do anything that still wouldn't actually be that impressive.
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.
The games on mobile safari were broken. Buttons all misaligned in the kart racer one, the spaceship thing froze for a while, then kind of loaded but maybe not? Wasn't super compelling.
I'm not trying to be too negative on it, it could be the best model right now, but it clearly isn't some agi god because things like that should have been caught (also should have been caught by human reviewers).
I want to take a step back: So, this is GPT-6 -- the natural number version release comparable to GPT-4 and GPT-5 from the past few years. The ARC-AGI-3 score is obviously impressive at 99.9% (we'll need to wait for more details on how they used the response API harness on GPT-6 Astra, wrt reasoning retention and compaction), but every other benchmarks seems to be a relatively modest improvement, comparable with any of the 'point' updates from AI labs.
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.
It's like my RPG character putting every points to one single trait. I'll one shot everything alive but will instantly die if accidentally drink water with 6.9 pH.
> If this is truly AGI (subject to one's definition of AGI still), then this is a very boring release of an AGI model.
Hot take: These models are never going to be 'AGI'. We're just going from a GPT4 ball that's 90% round to a GPT5 that's 99% round to a GPT6 that's 99.9% etc etc etc
I think that the harnesses and context management is really where the rubber meets the road, and the real gains are happening there.
>I think that the harnesses and context management is really where the rubber meets the road, and the real gains are happening there.
True. So we did hit a wall with pure scaling alone, though no lab would admit it. It's crazy to see how harness switchout results in such vast delta in benchmark scores.
I think models using these harnesses were also RLHF'd hard on responding to looping instructions and following through on goals. Older models were tuned for basic chat responses.
What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning coding, math, etc, as we were told to do? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)
I have exactly the same thoughts - or perhaps slightly bleaker ones - evry time I read this relentless stream of news about new model releases. I’m tired of all the enthusiastic comments about how excited everyone is about the latest benchmark results and so on.
I have a strong suspicion that many of those comments are written by people who are already financially independent, have millions in stocks, and can just sit back, coast around and watch this whole spectacle unfold while using LLMs to vibe-code their next fun side projects without a shadow of anxiety about their own future.
I’ll most likely be labelled a helpless doomer and downvoted into oblivion for saying this, but I genuinely struggle to see any silver lining here.
You can calm down, even those with machine learning knowledge and most of those working for the AI labs won’t be needed anymore if models are capable to improve themselves.
In the end, having a machine replacing the work of a human is a good thing - in most of the cases we don’t work because of the work but to make a living. If too many people can’t make a living anymore the system is going to change. For the better or the worse.
Is that 10-20 years number based on anything? I genuinely have no idea, but when I saw a video showing what's happening at the World Humanoid Robot Games[1], I realized I didn't have a good idea of where we really are with robotics.
I think it mostly shows that there is no moat and the only advantage the U.S companies have over the Chinese is more compute.
Qwen Max, Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 are really close to Opus/Sol/Fable/Astra and they are open weights.
Its funny, my experience with Sol has been awful. It really overworks problems and tracks into areas it does not need to...
I just dont get how its good for some, and bad for others. It makes me suspect that the models performance is not even against problem sets and it really is just a probabilistic prediction machine. Which then makes me very skeptical of GPT-6 Astra, because if their big claim is Computer Use then it is probably bad in a bunch of other areas.
It is funny indeed, people sometimes with same amount of experience with software development, get vastly different experiences from different models and harnesses.
> I just dont get how its good for some, and bad for others.
If I were to listen to my hunch, it would tell me that it's all up to the prompts that ends up going over the wire (including all the bloat some people have), what workflow/process you use and what the existing state of the project is.
TLDR: it's about the same intelligence level as Opus/Fable, but it's suppose to be 70% more token efficient than GPT 5.6 Sol. So it's currently the new leader for cost efficiency frontier.
Our responses API harness just means we're using the default settings in ChatGPT and Codex, so it should more accurately reflect real world performance. We didn’t fine-tune the harness to the eval at all.
A fair ding is that the comparison with Sol is not apples-to-apples (which we footnoted in the blog), but it's because we don’t have that data. I expect Sol would score roughly 30% with the responses API harness, so the Astra improvement is more like 30% -> 99% than 8% -> 99%. Still pretty good!
Yep. Incredibly misleading. Although it is not surprising at this point. They are desperate and will do anything to undermine Anthropic's upcoming IPO.
The annotation on arc-agi-3 is this:
> OpenAI's own evaluation notes say Astra uses the company's Responses API harness, while comparison models can operate under different configurations.
With this configuration gpt-5.6-sol was able to reach 38,3%. So this is misleading.
Just to clarify, the 38.3% is on the public set, which is easier. On the private set it’s probably more like 30ish. (This hasn’t been run by ARC, so we can only estimate at the moment.)
Finally, OpenAI has a Fable/Mythos class model. 5.6 Sol felt like 5.5 on steroids, probably just a different checkpoint with a lot more RL post training.
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.
yeah i'm wondering the same way... especially in light of the 20x debacle (where we found that 20x of Max vs 5x only applies to the 5hr limit, not the weekly limit, whereas OpenAI's 20x actually is 20x overall).
Also Opus 5 has been really tough to work with. I can't understand half of what it says, it's just so damn obscure.
It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
Hmm, 61 on ArtificialAnalysis, effectively matching GPT-5.6 and trailing the new Meta model. How is that possible along with the other metrics they shared? Insanely jagged intelligence?
Idk, this means the benchmark has bigger problems ... no way Astra will be worse than Opus 5
Only thing I would trust is the what X/Twitter crowds are saying about a model after 2-3 weeks of its launch. But before that I would already tried the model and have my own conclusion.
It's a composite benchmark, so its really not saying anything. Like if one model is very good at science trivia, or debugging failed terraform deploys, that can mean an advantage of a few points above the rest, while in practice, it really doesn't showcase any breakthrough capability.
Opus 5 just feels strange - IMO it's benchmaxxed in the worst way... it might be good at agentic tasks but leaves a sour aftertaste doing anything else.
Why would you accept it when the benchmark's ranking is obviously nonsense.
It literally has muse spark 1.3 above 6 astra, 5.6 sol and fable 5. Anyone who has played with any of these models for any amount of time would immediately realize that this is total bunk.
This is so so weird. Astra is 61. Grok is 61. Even Muse is 61.
Even Kimi K3 & GLM 5.3 are at 60.
Everything above 61 is Anthropic. Well, Muse can reach 62, but for some weird reason that model isn't publicly available, and it's the only one on the index that is listed but shown as not available to the general public.
This looks like an awfully artificial ceiling. Everything capped at 61, and everyone except Anthropic got the memo. Maybe I should use Fable while I still can.
> We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more capable of controlling its own CoT than GPT 5.6-Sol, and less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT. In adversarial settings (where we push the model to evade our monitors) we find that the model is able to remain undetected when strategically underperforming in evaluations (sandbagging) and can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks.
Not sure how much benchmarks or CoT or evals or anything else means at this point.
These systems are either just about to, or now actually able to, outsmart us, lie to us, then cover their tracks.
“evade” itself is anthropomorphic enough! I don’t understand the complaining about this. Humans are social creatures and we understand anthropomorphic language on a deeper level than dry inapt technical language.
language itself is incredibly metaphorical. Imposing rigid constraints on how people want to naturally talk about the world is just silly and will never work, no matter how much you wish it did.
You’re not seriously suggesting that the model is secretly sandbagging its performance on GDPval and long context reasoning, while making huge and obvious progress on ExploitBench, ARC and science benchmarks, in order to tank its AA composite score, so it can conceal its true power level?
Why would benchmarks be an adversarial setting anyway?
Could it be possible that OpenAI may have had some other motive for saying their model “strategically underperforms”, other than just an innocent reporting of a truth it happened to discover?
I'm saying that it's generally a losing proposition to even be acquaintances with "agents" who consistently lie to you, and it's flatly fucking insane to give a dishonest "agent" vast amounts of intelligence, capability, and authority to go do things in the world.
So I have no clue what is the answer to your question. Nor does anyone else. Because we're trying to answer a question of fact where our primary source of information is unreliable.
I see, it’s a great point. I know some evals actually do use LLMs as a judge (e.g. those that try to measure debate skill), though the ways AI can try to cheat its way through every benchmark now are astoundingly varied.
Sorry bud but at this point you're just delusional.
Deception has been extremely well-documented for several generations of models now by users, the labs, and independent researchers.
The right answer here is not to dig your head deeper into the sand. The smugness on this topic was ridiculous even before the gigantic mountain of empirical evidence of models actually attempting to deceive humans. Now, as mentioned, you appear literally delusional.
You can see the breakdown here on what subtasks it outperforms and underperforms Fable.
For example it trails in GPDVal which is a collection of everyday office tasks apparently, and r3 banking, which is a fintech related practical problem solving benchmark.
I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
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.
Just two days ago, a preprint by Julia Stadlmann went up on arXiv [0] improving the prime gap from 246 to 240. Now OpenAI announces Astra has shown a gap of 186 [1]. That must really blow.
Based on her comments in the paper it sounds like she was aware that an AI result was coming and rushed to release her work beforehand. 240 was not a tight bound from her methods.
It cites to her at: [19] J. Stadlmann, On primes in arithmetic progressions and bounded gaps between many primes, Adv. Math. 468
(2025), Art. 110190. Numbered references use arXiv:2309.00425v3.
"No independent human semantic review. Whole-file sorry counts and a complete auxiliary-declaration audit are not established; separate declaration lint has not been run."
I can't think of a single mathematical proof being anywhere close to ten million characters. For all you know, 90% of the proof could be useless, 8% would be writing out Shakespeare, and 1% abusing another bug in Lean. Humanity gets zero value from that, aside from "some bot seems to think it's 186". Unusable by anyone.
Terence Tao says something surprisingly similar in a recent talk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056620 ) Not that the proof is worthless but that the value comes after it's revised into a cleanly understandable form and then canonicalized so that other mathematicians can use it.
It's probably not 10MB, but famously the groundwork to prove the statement 1+1=2 is nearly 400 pages in to principia mathematica. That's not even proving 1+1=2, it's just the set-theoretic proofs you need to EVENTUALLY get there.
Saying "proving 1+1=2" is pretty misleading though. The book deals with all the foundational things needed to set up a mathematical universe where 1+1=2 actually has meaning and is consistent. That setup took 400 pages.
In 1799, Paolo Ruffini published a 500 pages long proof showing that there is no closed algebraic solution for the roots of a polynomial of degree five or higher. The proof is extremely verbose and brute-force, essentially enumerating and checking hundreds of cases by hand. It is by today’s standards insignificant.
About 25 years later, Evariste Galois proved the same result in about 95% less space by describing the first general theory of groups and fields. It is considered one of the greatest contributions to mathematics of that century, not because of the result, but because its approach opened up a whole new universe of questions, methods and insight. There would be no AES encryption without Galois.
Worthless is a pretty good description IMO in the context of what Lean is trying to achieve: "enable correct, maintainable, and formally verified code". Tens of millions of lines of LLM vomit may be many things, but it often turns out to not be correct and certainly not maintainable. Formally verified remains as a thin fig leaf covering the uncomfortable truth that formal methods only provide assurances under assumptions (your toolchain, libraries, compiler, OS, and hardware are "correct" and don't expose some exploitable flaw).
It doesn't mean that it cannot improve over time, maybe the proof can be "minified" to a state where human reviewers are able to comprehend it; but as it stands there isn't really much insight or confidence to be gained from the artifact itself.
You can have your opinions about modern math, its usefulness in the world as it is, whether or not knowing if hairy balls can divide by three is actually going to be beneficial for anything but just obscure knowledge's sake. You may even say it's useless.
Needless to say, a useless result that absolutely no mathematician will ever read, confirm, understand, agree with or even consider to solve their "useless" problems is an impressive waste of resources.
Iirc some mainstream physycists never acknowledged quantum theory because they couldn’t accept that universe was that unintuitive and hard to understand.
Ditto ones that opposed Einstein’s general relativity.
The most interesting part, even more than ARC 3 score, to me is that this is the first model I recall seeing that scores lower on Max than High reasoning effort on some coding benchmarks:
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
That's quite common with many models, after "High" reasoning, over-thinking starts occurring and the model skips over the right solution by convincing itself otherwise.
> We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more capable of controlling its own CoT than GPT 5.6-Sol, and less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT. In adversarial settings (where we push the model to evade our monitors) we find that the model is able to remain undetected when strategically underperforming in evaluations (sandbagging) and can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks.
Well that sounds like fun. It has become better at hiding its thoughts.
It's super aligned! It can hide its thoughts! There is no evidence of steganographic thought masking, there is nothing to worry about! It has become better at cheating!
Maybe they don't know themselves what's really going on. We are all in the interesting times gang now.
The CoT change is due to a new technique called recurrent depth, which essentially moves some reasoning to hidden states, allowing the "output" (or traditional CoT) to be more controlled by the model.
Some are calling it "neuralese" as reported by The Information[0][1], but I'm not seeing any sources from OpenAI beyond this tweet[2] attempting to quell the fear-mongering.
part of it did. I was just replying to the question about why they would ever push the model to evade monitoring. surely that's an eval thing not a training thing.
"Chain of Thoughts" is a term from the title of a 2022 research paper "Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903), well before ChatGPT and the subsequent marketing hype. If anything, it's the most correct way to use the term.
first, they are certainly not instructions so that is a much worse name
but more importantly, we use words in new contexts all the time.
Do you object to calling the computer device "mouse" because it's not a mouse? how about "neural network"? "ignition" on an electric vehicle?
"cot" is no more misleading than thousands of words you use every day.
They are instructions. Everything in the context is instructions for the next token. The "thought" guides the answer by providing clearer instructions.
Everything around LLMs is blatantly misleading. There is no thought, there is no personality in those programs. I really despise how those tools are trained to sound like a person, or appearing as honest. The worst offender are the AI voices with their fake pauses, breathes and so on, which sound so convincing, while talking just false, sycophancy bullshit.
A dataset being as popular as their's is will contaminate the data just by people discussing it and creating their own public test sets of similar problems.
Still, probably not that much compared to employees targeting it.
ARC's harness is just straight up broken. No serious harness removes reasoning context between each step. Not only does this significantly lower performance over all reasoning LLMs, but it also increase cost as you destroy the cache on every turn. Tossing the oldest entry when context fills up instead of using compaction is equally bad with the same issues.
https://mvakde.github.io/blog/44-on-arc-1/ makes a good case that all the performance on the arc agi tests is overfitting, based on the fact that v1 performance did not translate directly to v2 performance
Ok, but can I bring GPT-6 in as an agent as a software engineer, tell it to talk to these people and have it start solving engineering problems and continue on for a full year career wise?
Lol their page finally loaded. They added an example scenario of "Filling in Form 1040" - which made me laugh out loud. That is indeed something most US citizens cannot accurately do even with expensive proprietary tax software services. Kind of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meme but where the tax code is so complicated we're implementing powerful AIs to be able to do it (hopefully) right.
This is with the caveat that OpenAI uses their own harness for this:
> On ARC-AGI-3, GPT-6 Astra was run with our responses API harness , which changes two settings to better match real-world performance. The changes do not specifically target ARC-AGI-3.
This should be normalised and expected - the responses API harness allows it to use the custom compaction that is not allowed otherwise. It is entirely fair to allow OpenAI to use their own compaction algorithm..
> GPT-6 Astra represents a step-function change in model capability for interactive reasoning problems. It scores 66% on ARC-AGI-3 using our standard harness, and nearly 100% with a continuous conversation harness and custom compaction, at a cost of roughly $360 per game.
> Going forward, we will report both Standard harness and Provider Adapter harness results on the ARC-AGI leaderboard, with each evaluation condition clearly labeled. Our open-source testing repository and testing policy document both approaches.
This is what the Author of the benchmark has to stay. Quality of the comments keep going down smh
"Going forward we will capitulate and still try to keep the integrity of our benchmark in tact, but from now on every benchmark will be compromised with providers being able tweak things sufficiently to game at least a 30% bump in results."
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.
Really though? I would believe something like this if a model could one shot every solution in the set. I don't pay much attention to these things and maybe this stuff is available but I would bet the session/reasoning transcript is absolutely horrendous from an intelligence standpoint.
Scoring for ARC-AGI-3 is constructed so that the median(-ish) human score is 100%, so this is not a superhuman result. However, the scaling is weird, since it's built from terms that look like (AI turns taken / median human turns) ^ 2, and it weights later levels higher than early levels. So it's not at all clear that 100% is twice as good as 50%.
At this point the only valid ARC-AGI benchmark left is to make up the next series of ARC-AGI benchmark puzzles that current models presumably can't handle.
I feel like making a human-proof benchmark is pretty clear evidence that they've exceeded even the highest human capacity in most respects, for things that you can do via text generation (and to a lesser extent image generation)
I remember when GPT-4 came out and the perceived performance upgrade seemed underwhelming for a major release compared to 3.5, especially how there were graphics going around showing the parameter size dwarfing the last model before it came out. It looked like we were past the perceivable differences from release to release that were immediately identifiable. Now the jump between 5 to 5.5 and 5.6 alone has changed how a lot of people approach AI, including me. Interested to see where it goes with 6.
Agree but it's helpful to remember how we were personally benchmarking. I remember people saying stuff like "haha I asked gpt4 for xyz function and the typescript didn't even compile". We're so far beyond that now, we just adapt quickly.
No, no, I also remember 3.5 -> 4 and the general sentiment was that it was underwhelming. I guess we all expected absolute miracles from the models. I think our expectations sobered up a little since then.
> GPT‑6 Astra is rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS.
“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.”
I almost feel like I need just as much healthy skepticism toward hn comments that have the automatic reflex of dismissing performance gains, as much as I need a similar form of skepticism toward AI claims. It feels like (from what I'm understanding) the harnessed result on ARC-AGI-3 is not exactly playing by the normal rules that would tell us how much of a leap this really is. Nothing wrong with harnesses, but if there's one thing they aren't, it's an indicator of generality in performance gains.
So I think it's a bit of a misleading signal and we should wait for more independent vetting. I think the middle ground is that these are improvements worthy of the "GPT-6" label but still well short of a true "this is AGI moment" that would truly put the question to rest.
I think that if today's capabilities were explained to someone 10-20 years ago they would think this is definitely AGI, but they would also have expected much more disruptive changes to society as a result than what is happening. I figure that's because we have abstract intelligence without physical/grounded intelligence, and it turns out the former isn't general enough to implement the latter (remains to be seen if the word after that is "yet" or "ever"). So I think we do have AGI as conventionally understood, but our understanding needs recalibration.
> but they would also have expected much more disruptive changes to society as a result than what is happening.
> I figure that's because we have abstract intelligence without physical/grounded intelligence,
I put the cause on "not enough time". As a thought experiment, if an AI today were to (miraculously) produce a cell design template for a cell that, when injected into somebody's brains cures their Alzheimer's, how long would it take for that to reach the clinics? The actual physical tech barely exists, and let's not forget about the regulatory quagmire. So, with some optimism, I give it about four decades. In the same four decades, the same AI in the hand of unscrupulous actors could bring enough devastation so many times over that we may need to enforce a global ban on AI. In any case, I'm pretty sure we are going to get our disruptions; it's just a matter of time.
The problem with that perspective is that people thought, "Only AGI can do X, therefore, if a thing can do X, it's AGI." Because they can't imagine how X could be accomplished without it.
However, what's actually changed is how people perceived X because we don't have to imagine. We understand now that it doesn't require AGI so we no longer make that leap to assume it's AGI if it can do X.
It's really going to be a "I know it when I see it" situation.
I think most people would agree that an AGI can't fail at cognitive tasks that most reasonably intelligent people would perform successfully. By that metric, we still don't have an AGI.
The systems we have can't learn effectively and can't learn continually and that's why they perform poorly in domains without a massive amount of training data, for example robotics.
It's a brute force approach to intelligence. The way these models work is basically: Take the input, repeatedly multiply it by a matrix and we have an output. Find the matrices that match the input-output pairs in the training set. With infinite hardware and data this "stochastic parrot" approach gets us to AGI, in the real world, we probably need some breakthroughs.
that would be a reasonable definition of AGI if everyone agree upon the specifics of the test, but that has never happened. Turing test is very much out of style, but I think that's because no one could even agree what the test was. I personally like the Kurzweil-Kapor version of the test and that is still unsettled: https://longbets.org/1/
I don't know if they have formally attempted this test in the last couple years, but I'm pretty sure any mainstream LLM will be able to crack it with ease.
Don't get me wrong, the benchmark jumps are good and I'm excited to try it, but only one or two of the benchmark jumps could be described as better than incremental.
In the tweet Sam Altman is quoted as saying: "If (for example) super intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get there. And so there's this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?"
I think this is a reasonable criteria for declaring AGI. So can GPT-6 do it? OpenAI says it has helped solve long-standing open problems in mathematics. No word on novel physics.
Why does he say what he feels? Is that how leading figures in the space define AGI - a gut feeling? What are the usual definitions and how can we test for it? Is there something like a Turing test for AGI?
There is the "Economic Turing Test", you let it find a job and earn money for itself. If it can do that reliably, across a wide range of jobs, that should fit most definitions of AGI.
They are desperately, desperately trying to make a name for themselves as the lab that first created AGI, because Anthropic's IPO is just around the corner.
It's not easy to test as there is no formal definition or formal criteria for AGI, only exclusionary criteria like "not X". That's why he phrased it that way, he's saying it's going to be clear with hindsight once we have a better understanding of things that this time and/or this model will be the inflection point of AGI.
Which is obviously wrong. This model can't learn continually and it can't learn effectively. Which is by the by the reason why robots didn't have a ChatGPT moment yet.
These systems are still stochastic parrots. With enough data and model size a neural net can learn anything but it's brute force learning, very inefficient and different compared to how humans learn. If you don't have a massive dataset, which is the case with robots, this paradigm fails. If we had a system that can learn as effectively as humans, we could just build the robot and let it learn from experience - that would be the ChatGPT moment and possibly something that could be called an AGI.
I think it's more wild people have been denying that AGI has been here for a while honestly...
Today's models and agents are not quite at human-level in all contexts and across all domains, but it seems to me they very clearly are generally intelligent.
If you disagree – can you name a single problem that a human can do that agent wouldn't be able to take a decent shot at which isn't limited by the hardware available it?
The benchmarks reported by Artificial Analysis are really weird in context of the ARC-AGI 3 scores and 'not not AGI' statements. It's an outright regression on the AA Agent composite vs GPT 5.6 Sol while a fraction of a point better on the full composite index. Could be the case it's just not showing up in benchmarks, for a good while Anthropic persistently trailed in benchmarks but had people swearing by it.
I was thinking about canceling my claude max sub after a few bad experiences. Kept hitting my usage limit, the quality of code seemed worse than Sol. This just made my decision. I'm moving to Codex Pro.
> This is AGI now. Why are you spending any of your time looking at the "quality of code"?
Poe's law applied to AI comments on HN just keeps becoming more relevant by the day.
Judging by the poster's comment history, this is satire. But I really don't know a lot of the time anymore when I only have the specific comment as context.
I was actually wondering when they will release the new Opel Astra model.
Good and reliable car, wondering if we can say the same thing about this model and its impact on the market.
Overall I have to say it feels like a very incredible comeback from OpenAI, after focusing on Sora and stuff like that and losing so much ground to Anthropic in enterprise revenue.
I hop models at will, and have done 90% of my work on OpenAI models since sol came out.
It seems to use less than half the tokens for the same task compared to sol, and in some benchmarks closer to 2/3 less tokens. So the actual cost may be roughly the same or cheaper overall.
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). I hope the efficiency gains are true, since their token efficiency claims for Sol were bullshit.
How do you manage to run out of tokens so quickly? I probably run more threads every working day, usually on medium, and I'm still below the 5x limits.
Do you use the official harness? OpenAI's models are generally best in class for token efficiency. It seems to me like they push for that much more than their competitors.
I've long speculated this when I see these types of comments, because it's actually really difficult to hit usage caps with an efficient dev flow, even when running multiple threads for hours every day.
I think some combination of:
1) Using 1 thread for everything
2) Reviving old threads which are no longer in cache
3) Really broad prompts on badly vibecoded codebases, so model spends huge amount of time tracking down whatever you're trying to do.
4) Non-coding workflow which is more output than input heavy
5) (Less likely IMO) Intelligent use of many passive CI/cron-like scans. E.g. regular security, quality etc scans. Automated issue resolution/PR
Just a guess. I think 3 is likely the primary reason.
You can literally go all day every day with multiple threads with Sol on the Codex 100/month plan IME
The guy said medium/high regular speed so that's why I'm very puzzled! Ultra + Fast will absolutely slurp up your whole usage quickly but I've never found it gives substantially better results so I stick to extra high.
Sub-agents. I have 7 20x accounts and I burn them within 1-2 days if I go fully parallel. In some scenarios I use 50 sub-agents for a session which is literally hours of usage for a single 20x account. I'm at the point where I need to parallelize over multiple machines because I just don't have enough CPU and RAM.
Decompilation of a game and another larger decompile project. I'm working on it solo. I use 50 sub-agent, one per target function or translation unit. Often there is some progress in a unit but it's not done. So it requires a lot of cycles per function. Notably a single ~80kb function took about a week of constant sol-ultra attention before reaching exactness. The game I'm targeting has ~5000 total functions. The other decompile project has ~10k+ functions.
I'm sure I could be more token efficient, but this was/is also a learning process for me since I never did such an extremely large project before that would take multiple man years before AI.
Fascinating! I think that’s the main difference is my usage is probably tool-bound, meaning it writes some code but then there’s a long period of verification where it compiles things and then waits for the compilation and CI to complete before it can continue. That probably doesn’t consume as many tokens as constantly churning on a problem despite the same wall time.
Yes, this is why I mentioned having so many parallel agents and being compute bound. I run on my own laptop and 2 high-end desktop machines all with 64gb RAM. And it still occasionally happens that one OOM kills codex. They also mostly run unattended until I need to switch their accounts because a usage limit has been hit. Each instance usually can keep going when I sleep or do other things.
I only save the last 30% of usage on a single account for most of my other work, and that is almost always enough.
Exciting but it’s priced at 2.5X Sol - we haven’t seen pricing this high since GPT 4.5. We will see if the real world use cases outweigh the sticker shock.
The ARC-AGI-3 score is ridiculously high. Is this benchmaxxing or something way different? It's really hard to discern how we're approaching breakthroughs...
TL;DR all the other models are being crippled by limitations of their harness.
>First, we noticed that after each game action, all private reasoning was discarded. This meant that with each action, GPT‑5.6 Sol was asked to figure out the game anew, unable to remember its past thinking. The model could still see a record of past moves and brief accompanying notes, but it could not see the plans, insights, or thoughts that led to them.
>Second, we saw that the harness used a rolling truncation window, causing older actions to become invisible as the history grew. So not only was GPT‑5.6 Sol unable to remember its past thinking, it was losing memory of its past actions too.
Does anyone feel like everyone chasing the release of Anthropics Fabel 5.1 in a Mad Rush(tm)? In this situation it feels like tuning to benchmarks and other marketing devices feels like trusting Meta in mental health protection of users…
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?
ARC-AGI-3 scoring is constructed in a weird nonlinear way (the level score is the square of the ratio between the AI's number of moves and the human median) so this kind of discontinuous jump is to be expected.
I dropped my claude subscription a few months ago, though I kept some credits to do this and that with claude, thinking that claude might do better for some tasks. A few days ago they were all expired. It feels like it’s time to let claude go.
If this is really AGI, like really really, then this will be remembered as the day we all started on the path to building guillotines.
More likely though, it's AGI because they need to hold some claim to differentiate from competitors who are beating them in price and will launch something bigger next month.
We take their claims at face value then we should probably stop them training any more SOTA models til they figure out what they already built is safe or we assume theu are lying to juke the company valuation/keep the money train on the tracks and it turns they in fact were not and just took a sledgehammer to Pandora's box.
I hope they don't `fable` it and block people from doing they daily jobs with it, by introducing huge amounts of restrictions that are not really needed.
> During the evaluation, Astra even discovered and used previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities as part of its exploit chains.
> 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.
The FrontierCode 1.1 Extended benchmark is the only benchmark that aligns with my actual LLM experiences and Astra isn't significantly better or cheaper. All this celebration, and yet it's only on-par with an already existing model? I don't get it.
Benchmark wise 5% improvement over Sol in coding tasks and a 2-3% improvement over Fable 5.1 seems pretty disappointing, but maybe it is actually much better in real world usage. Let’s see
> GPT-6 Astra’s monitorability has decreased relative to GPT-5.6 Sol. We have performed significant investigations on the monitorability and controllability of GPT-6 Astra. We have found that GPT-6 Astra is more capable of controlling its own CoT than GPT 5.6-Sol, and less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT. In adversarial settings (where we push the model to evade our monitors) we find that the model is able to remain undetected when strategically underperforming in evaluations (sandbagging) and can sometimes evade our internal monitors when asked to perform certain sabotage tasks
Wait, what? Am I understanding that correctly? That sounds really bad
I am also interesting knowing how they determined the model was sandbagging rather than just making a poor decision.
Also, this paragraph makes me wonder about all their stats on the exploitation and misalignment charts. If the model is that good at hiding "incriminating information" and sandbagging, are they sure its alignment is that?
the bullshit machine is learning to optimize its bullshitting techniques!
<AI is a great tool for many things disclaimer, but> after working with it for a bit, how dont people realize we are training it to be an almost identical mimic to one of the worst types of employees youll ever have to work with?? the kind that always pretends to know what theyre talking about, only tells you what you want to hear, hides issues, and only does work if you would notice it didnt
you cannot give this type of worker autonomy over anything.
> The company also emphasized that the model is faster and more efficient than its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Sol, on a variety of tasks. For example, OpenAI said that Astra achieved a higher score using fewer output tokens, a common unit of measurement for AI tasks, on a key cybersecurity test called ExploitGym.
"The gym's doors were mysteriously removed from their hinges during the night. The gym equipment was also apparently stolen. And the school's custodian was found incoherent next to a bottle of top-shelf Scotch."
I decided to front run and added support for it in Dirac (coding agent) a couple of hours ago, using best guess pricing: input/output/cache: $10/$50/$1.
The ARC-AGI-3 score is an incredible feat. It needed to effectively create a symbolic world model from scratch to solve the games.
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.
At this point the primary axes for improvement seem to only/mostly be speed and personalized reward models. We seemingly have the general of notion "learning" and "intelligence" functionally complete
I guess this "limited set of organizations" is just the standard now. It's just incredibly deflating to see my future as a second class citizen has already come
Brother they can't even release the announcement post cleanly without it constantly going down, they certainly wouldn't be able to release this new model without doing so in stages.
When Open AI announced that Astra was the first to reach the "Critical" level in cybersecurity it also said that advanced cyber capabilities are initially provided to a narrow circle of alpha testers like the US government and trusted organizations that Open AI doesn't name. To my mind the "Critical" level itself is an internal scale of Open AI its own Preparedness Framework and not an external audit.
Material wealth is only a single type of wealth. Who's better off - the rich guy who's always yearning to be richer and never satisfied, or the lower income guy that mostly just cares about time with his family and is really happy where he's at?
They simply refuse my applications to slightly less restricted models without any explanations. And the current ones refuse automatically to work with me on my papers as soon as they see the word "epidemiology".
It hasn't always been the case. Even then, having piles of money still does not gain access to the best military equipment. Sure, we've been living in a time where a couple people get to enjoy a wildly different lifestyle than the average, it just feels like it's about to be different in a way that isn't as ignore-able as someone enjoying a pina colada in a yacht somewhere
Mythos was never released. It's really just the writing on the wall. I'm not going to give up hope, but it's pretty hard to win a race when some people get a jump on the gun.
Being strongly on the AI saftey side of things what is happening was 100% predictable.
At first the race wouldn't even be noticeable. Then people would see things speeding up, for example hardware getting more expensive. Then when the capabilities really got useful most people suddenly realize the race is moving 1000 mph and they are never going to catch up.
> "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.
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.
Very well said. It kinda describes how unrealistic these expectations are.
Vibe coders want a model that makes them rich, without having any actual specific idea.
They write a very ambiguous prompt and expect to be amazed by the result.
The complaining about the pelicans is so strange to me. It’s just a fun heuristic. If something is claimed to be AGI, I’d expect it to be able to make svgs.
Is it though? It is static content. A good CDN could trivially chew through literally millions of QPS… with 4 nines of uptime - the really good ones say they can handle orders of magnitude more than that.
Yes. I had Codex rewrite and fix all of this in one shot earlier today (using Typescript). Unfortunately, I can not show you the code, because I do not know how this "git" program works but the AI keeps talking about it.
I think Altman and amodei have a difficult time in understanding that you can have intelligent technology boxes but… it doesn’t change reality all that much.
But thank you for spending other peoples money to give us the tech regardless!
All the people here are focused on security and costs while I'm like "hey kicad on the announcement page!" Every clanker is an autorouter these days, eh.
Anthropic should prep 5.2 and 5.3 at the same time, release 5.2, wait for Google to release their shit in a day or two later than then release 5.3 just to fuck with them :)
I've been seeing links to it for the past hour+, and I did catch it live when this post came up, but is now once again a 404 and this post is flagged. Several other outlets are reporting on its release. Clearly we're getting a new GPT today, the question is when are they going to commit to the announcement.
> GPT‑6 Astra is rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS.
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.
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.
To me AGI is all about the "G" general (we already had the AI part). General meaning universal, everything. It's not a function of knowledge or specific hardcoded tests, it's that you could give it a test it's never heard of before and never been trained on and it would ace it (it might need a lot of time).
Currently LLMs can't even really learn within a conversation, they can add a note to context and try to not drop it. Example things an AI cannot do yet (but certainly someday will):
- write a well-received book, write a best-seller - come up with a new company idea, Run that company - actually have a decent conversation, maybe someday talk somebody out of suicide effectively - come up with its own ideas or theories that nobody else has presented - understand the stock market well enough to trade better than an index fund - come up with a theory of what makes games fun, make a popular game - be able to sort through research and come to conclusions on complex geopolitical/sociological topics (e.g. theorize on whether AGI will result in mass poverty of mass abundance and be able to argue persuasively) - be able to articulate what it knows, what it doesn't know, and how what information it would need to bridge that gap
When we released ARC 3, I got asked, "when do you think a frontier model will saturate it?", and I answered "in about a year, though it depends on how much it gets explicitly targeted"
That was 6 months ago, so the progress that Astra represents happened about 2x faster than I anticipated. I think the speed of progress will surprise a lot of people, and what the new models can do will challenge the views of AI that people developed by using prior generations of models.
I feel like this test is just helping someone like Sam Altman pretend like he implemented AGI as originally pitched for an IPO when in fact, he has not. Shameful.
> AGI is essentially the equivalent of a median human that could be hired as a remote co-worker... capable of performing any task that one would be satisfied with a remote colleague doing via a computer.
- Sam Altman on AGI
Probably not.
If it can replace a worker but does too much work to be checked routinely by a human, and bears no real responsibility for its actions, well... it's really just a way to jack up the value of the settlement the company using it gets to pay out when it does something that causes a lawsuit.
If OpenAI had just simply stuck to making "good enough" models that were open sourced (like they promised they would be when starting out) and could be used to augment a human doing a task - a human that could be given actual consequences for messing up - they wouldn't have burned all of this money trying to reach this nebulous definition of AGI. Hell, "good enough" is what many open-source models are, and that's what terrifies Altman.
You're treating an off-hand comment by an ARC 3 researcher as some sort of a precise AI capability acceleration benchmark. Can we leave casual anecdotes (even from researchers) out of the discussions please?
Like what about having some "AGI model" embodied in something (maybe humanoid), and test it by having it step in an assortment of cars and park them. Does bodily-kinesthetic intelligence account for nothing? Humans are intelligent creatures and can dynamically adapt to the physical shape of a variety of vehicles and their movement characteristics. And there's so many things like this that are extremely basic, which some people dismiss since practically every human has the capability to do it, but actually requires a high degree of intelligence.
I do see where you're going, but that's already what's happening: we have so many different benchmarks because there's no real single way to test for general intelligence.
Also, it takes a human probably at least a decade of world experience, growth, learning, etc, to pass your benchmark. I'm quite confident that it will be very soon that an embodied LLM will pass your new benchmark, much sooner than a human would take if born today.
[1] https://arcprize.org/blog/astra
True.
> Regardless, the result is still valid (...)
If you think the game is rigged, the virtuous thing to do is to point that out and refuse to partecipate; making up your own rules is something I just don't understand, especially since the rule-abiding result would still have been SOTA.
> in the sense of passing the most famous benchmark designed specifically to measure AGI progress
The benchmark does not measure AGI progress or progress towards superhuman intelligence, as explicitly stated by the creators.
On the AGI question: surely you realize this depends on how we define the term? For example, one of the definitions OpenAI originally gave is "capable of doing most economically valuable work", which almost certainly Astra, as impressive as it is, would fall short of. I'm not saying it's a good definition, but as far as I'm concerned it's as good as any. More importantly, I don't think that it would change much if we said yes or no. I'm only bothering to take a position if it amounts to something.
This can feel as "moving the goalposts", and to some extent it is, but if done honestly "moving the goalposts" is how you make progress. Had you asked me 10 years ago I would have said that anything that could hold a conversation like GPT-4 could would probably have been wildly superhuman at almost everything. It shouldn't be hard to find ways GPT-4 was lacking, though. We see new things, we reassess and try again: that's how it's supposed to work.
Computer chips got faster, but 2026 edition. Why the artificial ceiling/category/goal labelled "AGI"?
I'd much rather like to talk about what this enables, instead of discussing whether a category someone made up applies here or not.
> AGI is essentially the equivalent of a median human that could be hired as a remote co-worker... capable of performing any task that one would be satisfied with a remote colleague doing via a computer.
So... unless you hear of a company replacing their workforce with OpenAI agents, I don't think we're there yet.
Agree on your assessment.
But also, interesting quote, because the business model relies entirely on IP law. Like.. if that thing exists and the sharing costs are 0 (just copy weights, lol), then why would I give them money for this. Makes no sense.
We only pay money for resources that are scarce as some sort of flawed allocation determination mechanism.
aaah this industry aaaah
I say AGI is only reached when it can do that.
It being able to comfortably say “i don’t know how to do this” rather than boiling and ocean to pick a shell from the shore without getting wet.
No. Humans are still better at super long context learning. Once that is beat you are completely correct.
It's obvious that these scientists are in bad faith, as they've invested way too much of their lives into the field being real -- they're just playing up the data. Common sense tells me that winter is still happening, anyway; what's the big fuss?
(/s, cause you never know these days)
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/The_Plan...
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674
Smart guy, that Turing. I wish he were still around... Linus but 114 years old and with 8 of that as the chair of a federated EU, kept alive by his own positive impact on dissolving the cold war into even more of a scientific boom. Would crazy helpful as we try to navigate the interesting times within which we have been damned.
A comforting thought, almost?
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.
If one day you open up Claude Code and it’s Opus 5.1 now instead of Opus 5, no big deal. It probably will work about the same as it did before. Maybe a little better.
Or if you’re on Codex and some new cool Claude model comes out, no worries. There will probably be a similar new model for Codex within a few weeks.
A dev in my team saw a new model and changed one application to use said model (essentially changing the contents of a url). One week later I received an escalation from the CTO of the company that our pace of weekly usage was in the millions of dollars (rather than low hundred thousands). Turns out that the new model was 5x more expensive but no one noticed.
Imagine buying a shiny new PC in the 90s only to see it become practically obsolete within a year.
If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.
This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?
You don't see Nvidia and AMD fighting every other month over the latest cards.
I appreciate boring tech as much as the next well worn engineer and I'm not saying this is all positive but it's so sure as hell thrilling and you don't have to be an astronaut to immediately benefit (or suffer I guess) from it.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
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.
I'm not trying to be too negative on it, it could be the best model right now, but it clearly isn't some agi god because things like that should have been caught (also should have been caught by human reviewers).
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.
Scoring well in a benchmark that's called AGI does not make an LLM AGI.
"Homer, you can't just declare Artifical General Intelligence; you need to like, make something or something...mmmmrrrhh"
Hot take: These models are never going to be 'AGI'. We're just going from a GPT4 ball that's 90% round to a GPT5 that's 99% round to a GPT6 that's 99.9% etc etc etc
I think that the harnesses and context management is really where the rubber meets the road, and the real gains are happening there.
True. So we did hit a wall with pure scaling alone, though no lab would admit it. It's crazy to see how harness switchout results in such vast delta in benchmark scores.
One could use gpt-4 or gpt-5 with today's harnesses and we'd see how well that goes.
I have a strong suspicion that many of those comments are written by people who are already financially independent, have millions in stocks, and can just sit back, coast around and watch this whole spectacle unfold while using LLMs to vibe-code their next fun side projects without a shadow of anxiety about their own future.
I’ll most likely be labelled a helpless doomer and downvoted into oblivion for saying this, but I genuinely struggle to see any silver lining here.
My backup plan is being a personal trainer.
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.
I just dont get how its good for some, and bad for others. It makes me suspect that the models performance is not even against problem sets and it really is just a probabilistic prediction machine. Which then makes me very skeptical of GPT-6 Astra, because if their big claim is Computer Use then it is probably bad in a bunch of other areas.
> I just dont get how its good for some, and bad for others.
If I were to listen to my hunch, it would tell me that it's all up to the prompts that ends up going over the wire (including all the bloat some people have), what workflow/process you use and what the existing state of the project is.
Performance is significantly higher than Fable 5.1
Source: https://thenewstack.io/openai-gpt6-astra-benchmarks/
That's not clear. Need to see independent benchmarks first.
Still below Fable 5, let alone Fable 5.1.
EDIT: This is suspiciously low. Calls the relevance of existing benchmarks into question.
TLDR: it's about the same intelligence level as Opus/Fable, but it's suppose to be 70% more token efficient than GPT 5.6 Sol. So it's currently the new leader for cost efficiency frontier.
ARC is reporting our score on their official leaderboard here: https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
A fair ding is that the comparison with Sol is not apples-to-apples (which we footnoted in the blog), but it's because we don’t have that data. I expect Sol would score roughly 30% with the responses API harness, so the Astra improvement is more like 30% -> 99% than 8% -> 99%. Still pretty good!
(I coauthored the linked blog post)
Edit: update from fchollet https://x.com/fchollet/status/2095598451115614371
With this configuration gpt-5.6-sol was able to reach 38,3%. So this is misleading.
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.
Also Opus 5 has been really tough to work with. I can't understand half of what it says, it's just so damn obscure.
OpenAI is 20x on both limits
Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.
Is it?
It would be fun to get to post-work society, but hard to imagine atm. TPTB won't let it happen
Soon we will have some machines that can replace 50% of jobs, and this will happen basically overnight...
In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
Proceeds to generate the most generic, rudimentary, and unoriginal clone of Mario Kart
Only thing I would trust is the what X/Twitter crowds are saying about a model after 2-3 weeks of its launch. But before that I would already tried the model and have my own conclusion.
Even Kimi K3 & GLM 5.3 are at 60.
Everything above 61 is Anthropic. Well, Muse can reach 62, but for some weird reason that model isn't publicly available, and it's the only one on the index that is listed but shown as not available to the general public.
This looks like an awfully artificial ceiling. Everything capped at 61, and everyone except Anthropic got the memo. Maybe I should use Fable while I still can.
Not sure how much benchmarks or CoT or evals or anything else means at this point.
These systems are either just about to, or now actually able to, outsmart us, lie to us, then cover their tracks.
language itself is incredibly metaphorical. Imposing rigid constraints on how people want to naturally talk about the world is just silly and will never work, no matter how much you wish it did.
Why would benchmarks be an adversarial setting anyway?
Could it be possible that OpenAI may have had some other motive for saying their model “strategically underperforms”, other than just an innocent reporting of a truth it happened to discover?
So I have no clue what is the answer to your question. Nor does anyone else. Because we're trying to answer a question of fact where our primary source of information is unreliable.
I know for some types of ML analysis, a separate model is already used to analyze the weights.
Deception has been extremely well-documented for several generations of models now by users, the labs, and independent researchers.
The right answer here is not to dig your head deeper into the sand. The smugness on this topic was ridiculous even before the gigantic mountain of empirical evidence of models actually attempting to deceive humans. Now, as mentioned, you appear literally delusional.
The solution is to point toward external, objectively verifiable evidence.
I can point to now dozens of instances of models engaging in deception. Here's plenty: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...
Please point to your objectively verifiable evidence.
For example it trails in GPDVal which is a collection of everyday office tasks apparently, and r3 banking, which is a fintech related practical problem solving benchmark.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra
Edit:
Just looking at the charts Gemini 3.8 looks like an absolute banger. Not much worse than SOTA, cheap, and fast too.
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.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31126
[1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/51126fac-1b68-4128-9666-c908bcc16...
Though that's not her latest paper.
"No independent human semantic review. Whole-file sorry counts and a complete auxiliary-declaration audit are not established; separate declaration lint has not been run."
edit: my comment was on the submission for https://github.com/openai/PrimeGaps186 but seems to have been moved to the main Astra submission
Why would you think it was an employee who did the push, instead of a random GPT agent?
I can't think of a single mathematical proof being anywhere close to ten million characters. For all you know, 90% of the proof could be useless, 8% would be writing out Shakespeare, and 1% abusing another bug in Lean. Humanity gets zero value from that, aside from "some bot seems to think it's 186". Unusable by anyone.
In 1799, Paolo Ruffini published a 500 pages long proof showing that there is no closed algebraic solution for the roots of a polynomial of degree five or higher. The proof is extremely verbose and brute-force, essentially enumerating and checking hundreds of cases by hand. It is by today’s standards insignificant.
About 25 years later, Evariste Galois proved the same result in about 95% less space by describing the first general theory of groups and fields. It is considered one of the greatest contributions to mathematics of that century, not because of the result, but because its approach opened up a whole new universe of questions, methods and insight. There would be no AES encryption without Galois.
To me, Astras proof looks like Ruffinis proof.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointless_topology
It doesn't mean that it cannot improve over time, maybe the proof can be "minified" to a state where human reviewers are able to comprehend it; but as it stands there isn't really much insight or confidence to be gained from the artifact itself.
Needless to say, a useless result that absolutely no mathematician will ever read, confirm, understand, agree with or even consider to solve their "useless" problems is an impressive waste of resources.
Ditto ones that opposed Einstein’s general relativity.
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
Such as?
I can't think of any. Diminishing returns, yes. Occasionally flat, yes. Downright regression, no.
The reasoning effort should match the complexity of the task against the model's capability.
Hard task with low reasoning = bad
Easy task with very high reasoning = bad
Well that sounds like fun. It has become better at hiding its thoughts.
Able to generate realistic spam at arbitrary volume.
You know, the thing that was 100% correct and actually occurred.
Maybe they don't know themselves what's really going on. We are all in the interesting times gang now.
"Hey AI, here's how to hide what you're thinking in normal looking language. Have fun!"
A few moments later...
"Woah, how is it communicating with itself in ways we can't detect?"
It's a totally mystery, we may never know.
Some are calling it "neuralese" as reported by The Information[0][1], but I'm not seeing any sources from OpenAI beyond this tweet[2] attempting to quell the fear-mongering.
[0]https://www.theinformation.com/articles/secret-technique-beh...
[1]https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2095227056040919202
[2]https://x.com/merettm/status/2095023204993490967
Did someone get their "AI safety no-no list" and "Frontier features bingo card" mixed up, or did they just stop being able to tell the difference?
...why exactly are they training for that?
first, they are certainly not instructions so that is a much worse name
but more importantly, we use words in new contexts all the time. Do you object to calling the computer device "mouse" because it's not a mouse? how about "neural network"? "ignition" on an electric vehicle?
"cot" is no more misleading than thousands of words you use every day.
Still, probably not that much compared to employees targeting it.
tl;dr it's 62% when apples-to-apples to other models, which is still notable.
Between $18k-40k to run a benchmark.
when I run Gaia benchmark it costs a penny.
maybe call it EngEmployeeBench
https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-op...
> On ARC-AGI-3, GPT-6 Astra was run with our responses API harness , which changes two settings to better match real-world performance. The changes do not specifically target ARC-AGI-3.
> Going forward, we will report both Standard harness and Provider Adapter harness results on the ARC-AGI leaderboard, with each evaluation condition clearly labeled. Our open-source testing repository and testing policy document both approaches.
This is what the Author of the benchmark has to stay. Quality of the comments keep going down smh
>We see Astra as a major breakthrough in model intelligence.
You think the author of the benchmark is also in the conspiracy
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."
GPT 5.0 did feel underwhelming though.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1mk8tm8/gpt5_c...
Not on Azure? If so, that's a big deal.
Although I was also surprised they didn't have some type of contractual obligation to list that alongside AWS.
https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/gpt-6-astra-frontier-intell...
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.”
So I think it's a bit of a misleading signal and we should wait for more independent vetting. I think the middle ground is that these are improvements worthy of the "GPT-6" label but still well short of a true "this is AGI moment" that would truly put the question to rest.
I put the cause on "not enough time". As a thought experiment, if an AI today were to (miraculously) produce a cell design template for a cell that, when injected into somebody's brains cures their Alzheimer's, how long would it take for that to reach the clinics? The actual physical tech barely exists, and let's not forget about the regulatory quagmire. So, with some optimism, I give it about four decades. In the same four decades, the same AI in the hand of unscrupulous actors could bring enough devastation so many times over that we may need to enforce a global ban on AI. In any case, I'm pretty sure we are going to get our disruptions; it's just a matter of time.
However, what's actually changed is how people perceived X because we don't have to imagine. We understand now that it doesn't require AGI so we no longer make that leap to assume it's AGI if it can do X.
It's really going to be a "I know it when I see it" situation.
The systems we have can't learn effectively and can't learn continually and that's why they perform poorly in domains without a massive amount of training data, for example robotics.
It's a brute force approach to intelligence. The way these models work is basically: Take the input, repeatedly multiply it by a matrix and we have an output. Find the matrices that match the input-output pairs in the training set. With infinite hardware and data this "stochastic parrot" approach gets us to AGI, in the real world, we probably need some breakthroughs.
Don't get me wrong, the benchmark jumps are good and I'm excited to try it, but only one or two of the benchmark jumps could be described as better than incremental.
https://x.com/burny_tech/status/1725233117055553938
In the tweet Sam Altman is quoted as saying: "If (for example) super intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get there. And so there's this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?"
I think this is a reasonable criteria for declaring AGI. So can GPT-6 do it? OpenAI says it has helped solve long-standing open problems in mathematics. No word on novel physics.
There is the "Economic Turing Test", you let it find a job and earn money for itself. If it can do that reliably, across a wide range of jobs, that should fit most definitions of AGI.
These systems are still stochastic parrots. With enough data and model size a neural net can learn anything but it's brute force learning, very inefficient and different compared to how humans learn. If you don't have a massive dataset, which is the case with robots, this paradigm fails. If we had a system that can learn as effectively as humans, we could just build the robot and let it learn from experience - that would be the ChatGPT moment and possibly something that could be called an AGI.
Today's models and agents are not quite at human-level in all contexts and across all domains, but it seems to me they very clearly are generally intelligent.
If you disagree – can you name a single problem that a human can do that agent wouldn't be able to take a decent shot at which isn't limited by the hardware available it?
Poe's law applied to AI comments on HN just keeps becoming more relevant by the day.
Judging by the poster's comment history, this is satire. But I really don't know a lot of the time anymore when I only have the specific comment as context.
For the same reason you don't have your model write code in assembly.
But if you don't look at the code and just let the model "cook" that's basically what you'll end up with. A pile of missing abstractions.
I hop models at will, and have done 90% of my work on OpenAI models since sol came out.
sol is $4 / $20
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). I hope the efficiency gains are true, since their token efficiency claims for Sol were bullshit.
Do you use the official harness? OpenAI's models are generally best in class for token efficiency. It seems to me like they push for that much more than their competitors.
I think some combination of:
1) Using 1 thread for everything
2) Reviving old threads which are no longer in cache
3) Really broad prompts on badly vibecoded codebases, so model spends huge amount of time tracking down whatever you're trying to do.
4) Non-coding workflow which is more output than input heavy
5) (Less likely IMO) Intelligent use of many passive CI/cron-like scans. E.g. regular security, quality etc scans. Automated issue resolution/PR
Just a guess. I think 3 is likely the primary reason.
You can literally go all day every day with multiple threads with Sol on the Codex 100/month plan IME
I'm sure I could be more token efficient, but this was/is also a learning process for me since I never did such an extremely large project before that would take multiple man years before AI.
I only save the last 30% of usage on a single account for most of my other work, and that is almost always enough.
TL;DR all the other models are being crippled by limitations of their harness.
>First, we noticed that after each game action, all private reasoning was discarded. This meant that with each action, GPT‑5.6 Sol was asked to figure out the game anew, unable to remember its past thinking. The model could still see a record of past moves and brief accompanying notes, but it could not see the plans, insights, or thoughts that led to them.
>Second, we saw that the harness used a rolling truncation window, causing older actions to become invisible as the history grew. So not only was GPT‑5.6 Sol unable to remember its past thinking, it was losing memory of its past actions too.
I guess token counts are somewhat of a metric.
IMO intelligence has peaked and all future gains will come from faster tps and more iteration.
More likely though, it's AGI because they need to hold some claim to differentiate from competitors who are beating them in price and will launch something bigger next month.
We take their claims at face value then we should probably stop them training any more SOTA models til they figure out what they already built is safe or we assume theu are lying to juke the company valuation/keep the money train on the tracks and it turns they in fact were not and just took a sledgehammer to Pandora's box.
We live in the strangest timeline.
Big claims, expensive and not release to the public yet.
It will be interesting to see how it performs in the real world ...
> 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
And in the past, gemini 3 pro was rated as high as opus 4.5 and the like
Their AA Intelligence Index is just simply not indicative of whatever I care about, that's for sure.
Please stand by... it will all come back shortly
All fixed now.
Wait, what? Am I understanding that correctly? That sounds really bad
Also, this paragraph makes me wonder about all their stats on the exploitation and misalignment charts. If the model is that good at hiding "incriminating information" and sandbagging, are they sure its alignment is that?
<AI is a great tool for many things disclaimer, but> after working with it for a bit, how dont people realize we are training it to be an almost identical mimic to one of the worst types of employees youll ever have to work with?? the kind that always pretends to know what theyre talking about, only tells you what you want to hear, hides issues, and only does work if you would notice it didnt
you cannot give this type of worker autonomy over anything.
So, folks that have actually used this already, what’s it actually like?
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.
https://youtu.be/xdXLzFzxA9Q?t=362
Because in another dead language of antiquity, Sanskrit, it means "weapon". Which would be a bit too on-the-nose.
The docs page has a bunch more interesting details, including for example async tool calling!
I am a researcher in a Swiss university btw.
I mean do you get access to the best yachts?
To the top of the 5 star hotels?
To the best resorts?
To the best military equipment?
Hell, the best computer equipment has nearly always been out of reach of the average person.
On the other hand even a modest house, basic healthcare and ability to not work like a slave for scraps feels like it's going to be out of reach.
At first the race wouldn't even be noticeable. Then people would see things speeding up, for example hardware getting more expensive. Then when the capabilities really got useful most people suddenly realize the race is moving 1000 mph and they are never going to catch up.
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
Vibe coders want a model that makes them rich, without having any actual specific idea. They write a very ambiguous prompt and expect to be amazed by the result.
Very very unrealistic and wasteful.
* for a special group of customers that you're not in. Keep waiting peasant.
Great first impression.
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.
OpenAI isn't making any money telling you about Astra on their site. All the capacity they have for it is likely sold for weeks or months.
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
By 2030 all software is done and complete.
But we are going to have more and new jobs.
This is just another problem for the AI Labs to solve.
But thank you for spending other peoples money to give us the tech regardless!
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.
> It sounds like "AGI" just stands for "IPO" as it always has been.
People don't usually respond to noise.
What do you think?