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Sam Altman weighed ChatGPT against an almond -- AI Brief September 4
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Good day %%first_name%%. OpenAI shipped GPT-6 on Thursday, called it the start of the AGI era, and then most of you could not use it — partly by design, partly because ChatGPT, Claude and Grok had all fallen over that same morning. Anthropic, meanwhile, taught Claude to work your Mac while you are still sitting at it. A YC startup watched 17,000 coding-agent sessions to learn which vendors the agents buy when nobody is looking. And Sam Altman would like to talk to you about almonds.
OpenAI Declares the AGI Era. Access Pending.
What happened: On Thursday, September 3, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra and called it “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model.” It is rolling out first to “a limited set of organizations,” with Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, the API and AWS Bedrock following “over the coming days.” API pricing is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, a step up from GPT-5.6 Sol, with a “fast mode” at double that.
Why it matters: The headline claim is not chat, it is work: OpenAI says Astra fills out forms, updates a CRM, lays out a circuit board and builds a slide deck in your own template, and does it in about half the time per task of its predecessor on the OSWorld computer-use test. It also crosses OpenAI’s “Critical” line for cybersecurity — it found two previously unknown zero-day bugs during testing — so the public version refuses to write exploits and ships with a misalignment monitor that can pause your task mid-run.
What everyone’s saying: OpenAI president Greg Brockman told reporters “it’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era,” per Axios, while 9to5Google headlined the launch as the most intelligent model “that you can’t use just yet.” The Hacker News thread spent its first hour watching the announcement page return a 404, noticed the 99.9% ARC-AGI-3 score carries a footnote about OpenAI’s own custom harness, and did the arithmetic on 2.5x Sol’s output price.
My read between the lines: Read OpenAI’s own comparison table before you read the press release. On the Artificial Analysis index — the one Fable 5.1 topped yesterday — Astra scores 61.2 to Fable 5.1’s 65.7, and it trails on Humanity’s Last Exam too. OpenAI is not claiming the smartest model. It is claiming the best one at using a mouse, and it published the numbers that say so. The AGI line is for the people who will never scroll that far.
📖 Further reading: An AI That Can Use Your Computer Better Than You Can. I’m Not Sure How to Feel About That. — the OSWorld number that made me write that piece just got beaten by 47% on time, and the feelings have not resolved.
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ChatGPT, Claude and Grok All Went Dark at Once
What happened: On Thursday morning, September 3,