OpenAI unleashes Astra, its most capable and controversial model yet

“Welcome to the AGI era,” said OpenAI president Greg Brockman at the tail end of a call with reporters about the Thursday release of the company’s newest model, GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI describes AGI, or artificial general intelligence, as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” The company calls Astra its most intelligent and safest model to date, built on advances in pre-training, reinforcement learning, and safety guardrails. OpenAI VP of research Aidan Clark said more than 100,000 GPUs were used to train it. OpenAI said Astra outscored all other frontier models in benchmark tests measuring computer use, browser use, software engineering, cybersecurity, science, and professional work. It notched perfect or near-perfect scores on some especially difficult evaluations. Astra scored 98.6% on ARC-AGI 3, a game-style reasoning test designed to make advance preparation of the model almost impossible. “When we look back and ask when AGI arrived, we’ll see that it’s about this time and it’s about this model,” Brockman said. Astra is rolling out Thursday to enterprise customers with Daybreak access, OpenAI’s restricted-access program for cyberse…