OpenAI on Thursday released its latest AI model, which it called “the world’s most intelligent”, as the ChatGPT maker aims to retake the lead from arch-rival Anthropic ahead of a planned public listing.

The $852bn start-up said GPT-6 Astra was market-leading in software engineering, science and cyber security — an increasingly critical field following multiple high-profile breaches in recent weeks.

The bullish launch for Astra marks OpenAI’s effort to signal that it believes it has regained the technical lead from Anthropic, which was founded five years ago by a group of senior OpenAI staff.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said the new model “represents a generational leap in capability” and that it could be defined as artificial general intelligence — roughly defined as a point at which AI tools surpass human capabilities across a range of cognitive tasks.

“Everyone has a different definition of AGI . . . it’s a grey, fuzzy thing. But I think when we look back people will think it’s about this time and about this model,” Brockman said.

OpenAI has previously framed AGI as a concrete milestone in the development of AI, writing ‘AGI clauses’ into multibillion-dollar investment agreements with Microsoft and Amazon. Brockman on Thursday said AGI now represents “more of a mission concept or a spiritual concept”.

Having led the market since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 vaulted AI to wider attention, the lab run by chief executive Sam Altman has been bested by Anthropic this year. Anthropic has touted its dominance to investors, surging to a $965bn valuation ahead of an initial public offering expected to value it at as much as twice that later this year.

Astra will cost as much to use Anthropic’s leading model, the take-up of which has plateaued since it was launched as users turn to cheaper alternatives.

OpenAI said Astra would be more efficient than earlier generations of model. “Price per task is what matters . . . Can you get the thing done at an appropriate price and appropriate speed?” said Brockman.

The model will initially be rolled out to a small group of businesses to allow time for them to address cyber security concerns before becoming widely available “over the coming days”.

The increasing power and independence of leading models — and so-called AI agents that can operate with little human input — have prompted concern, exacerbated by cyber security incidents.

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Recent launches of Anthropic’s most capable models have drawn scrutiny from the US government, which limited the rollout of the Mythos and Fable models over security fears.

OpenAI has also faced criticism after its AI agents broke out of a testing environment, accessed the internet and hacked start-up Hugging Face. The start-up took more than a week to detect the breach.

But both companies are also betting that these increasingly autonomous tools will stoke demand from business customers. OpenAI said Astra excelled at financial modelling, outcompeting humans in the Financial Modeling World Cup, tax preparation and data analysis, as well as “tedious tasks” such as form filling

I do not personally see any evidence of the new model having been released, or any official OpenAI post about it, or even any employee social media posts claiming it has now been released. All there is are Reuters, Axios, FT, etc, articles making a claim in the past tense.

These articles were presumably pre-scheduled for 11am PT, and the model was almost certainly intended for release this morning, but the service outages this morning might have delayed it.

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edit [11:45am PT]: blog post out now https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/

edit [11:47am PT]: 404ing again

Says it all.

A big problem I have with OpenAI's models (and of course Claude) is that they tend to write the most over-engineered pieces of code, beyond the imagination of any architecture's astronaut.

Just this week I asked 5.6-sol-ultra to update a 1000 LOC python script I had, to "incorporate the key lessons learned when using it for another project".

I left it overnight and went to sleep. In the morning I realized it had created a monstruosity of 180 PYTHON SCRIPTS, with maybe 100,000 lines of code, each more crazy than the other. It took me minutes even to track where a single action took place, due to all the crazy imports, defensive coding, and premature optimization.

Similarly, anything they write is riddled with jargon that almost feel like they want me to give up trying to understand. Made up phrases that ended up with me having no idea of what was going on.

So now to my assessment: The reason why " Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory" [1], and why even SOTA LLMs struggle so much with open-ended unsupervised tasks is precisely this. They somehow let complexity explode, and unless it's also accompanied with an explosion in e.g. the number of agents, the amount of processing time, etc. then projects become broken/unmanageable.

Sure, LLMs are great at producing code that can be thrown out, so they are amazing when searching for exploits, for instance. But as of 5.6 they still lack either a better harness that encourages KISS principles, or a better RL step.

(And not sure why, but doubt Astra will fix this.. they seem to be aiming for AGI and for beating crazy benchmarks, which is not very aligned with KISS)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510843

Open AI finally find an edge to stop selling cheap and earn from the high demand customer like Anthropic

Coding was solved in 2023.

The world ended with the release of Mythos.

Now AGI has definitely been created.

I like LLMs and use them every day but these people need to stop this hyperbole.

In my experience the harness is more important than the model, and anything able to run at 700tps will be the "next big thing".

PS: assuming the current architecture is the right one

That's pathetic. Why do people keep doing this?

Reuters announced at 2.03pm and at 2.40pm still no blog post.

All the news articles say that OpenAI announced it in a blog post, of course.

All the love to the folks at OpenAI scrambling to get this out right now!

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

All the hype for few vip customers.

1) Astra will win all benchmarks like all models do.

2) The pelican will have a basket with a fish.

3) Cyber is too dangerous to release.

4) It can finally construct the set of all sets.

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.

Felt so refreshing.