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The AI doom cycle swallowed Astra

OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra can take on more with less human guidance, but warnings from AI researchers have shifted attention to the risks

Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra this month with the kind of pitch that, under normal circumstances, would have dominated the AI news cycle for at least a few days.

The company says Astra is its fastest and most capable model yet. It can navigate websites, fill out forms, work across spreadsheets and desktop apps, build websites, conduct research and carry out longer chains of work with less human hand-holding. On one computer-use benchmark, Astra scored 72.6%, up from 65.7% from its previous model, while completing tasks in roughly half the time.

That matters because the business bet on AI is shifting from chatbots that tell workers what to do to agents that can actually do it. OpenAI says Astra can handle everything from tax preparation and apartment hunting to game development and architectural rendering. In one company test, it completed a job-search task in under three minutes that OpenAI estimated would take a human........

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