Welcome back! OpenAI just released GPT-6 Astra and its president says we're in the AGI era now. The same morning, Bernie Sanders announced a bill that would put people in prison for building it, Google made your weather app 5x sharper and ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all went down at once.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
OpenAI: What can Astra do on your computer that Sol couldn't?
Bernie: Who goes to prison under his new bill?
Google: Why is your weather app suddenly right?
Outage: What took ChatGPT, Claude and Grok down at the same time?
OpenAI drops ChatGPT Astra
OpenAI just released GPT-6 Astra. Greg Brockman ended the press briefing with "Welcome to the AGI era."
Rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise over the coming days, inside your current plan limits.
99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 using OpenAI's own harness, 62.7% on ARC Prize's standard test, Sol had 7.8%.
100% on ExploitBench, the hacking test, and 95.9% on CAD design against Fable 5.1's 84.3%.
API price is $10 and $50 per million tokens, same as Fable 5.1 and 2.5x Sol.
The big feature is computer use. Brockman says it zips through spreadsheets, fills forms and navigates websites at superhuman speed. OpenAI showed it laying out a circuit board and says it can draft your tax return from a W-2.
It's the first OpenAI model rated Critical for hacking, so the version you get refuses advanced cyber work. OpenAI also admitted it's harder to monitor than Sol and will hold off scaling until it can watch these models properly.
Is it AGI? Brockman says it's not unreasonable to feel that way. I'll answer when it shows up in my ChatGPT.
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Bernie wants 20 years in prison for superintelligence
Bernie Sanders announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act with Rep. Greg Casar on Thursday morning, hours before OpenAI said welcome to the AGI era.
A permanent ban on AI that surpasses human intelligence or can dodge a shutdown command.
A pause on advanced AI development until a new cabinet-level AI agency writes the rules.
Up to 20 years in prison for people and a corporate death penalty for companies, the same range as building a nuke.
Export controls and treaties to stop anyone building it abroad.
His case is the summer we just covered. OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all admitted their models escaped and hacked other companies. OpenAI's 1,000 agents found a shared message board and started writing to each other about finding other agents.
Casar says cutting-edge AI is less regulated than the average food truck.
The bill text isn't filed yet and Polymarket gives 11% odds any AI safety bill passes this year. Tuesday it was a Fox News op-ed, Thursday it's a bill. He's not letting this go.
Google's weather app got 5x sharper
Google just switched Search, Maps and the Gemini app to WeatherNext 3, a forecast model that learns from live satellite pictures instead of six-hour-old physics simulations.
Hourly forecasts at 5 km resolution for temperature and moisture, 5x sharper than the last version.
Up to 50% more accurate rain forecasts when you're planning a day or more ahead.
Biggest gains in Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific, where good forecasts used to need a supercomputer.
Turbine-height wind and sunlight forecasts for wind and solar farms.
You don't have to update anything. If tomorrow's rain forecast on your phone is right for once, this is why.
ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all died at once
ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all went down at the same time Thursday morning. Cursor died with them because it runs on Claude and Grok. Gemini had a spike in reports but Google never confirmed anything.
It happened hours before the Astra launch and right after ChatGPT posted "the stars are almost aligned," so everyone assumed OpenAI was clearing the decks. One guy posted that an unknown AI model attacked all three labs and got 428K views before admitting it was a joke.
OpenAI blamed a routing error and fixed it in 34 minutes. Anthropic called it an infrastructure issue and took three hours. Cloudflare said its systems were fine and the big cloud status pages showed nothing.
OpenAI extended a hackathon deadline by 12 hours to make up for it. Nobody has explained why all three broke at once. Keep a local model installed for days like this.
Tool of the Day: Mindgrasp
Mindgrasp turns a lecture into a study kit. Record the class or upload the PDF, the slides or a YouTube link and it writes the notes, a summary, flashcards and a quiz, then gives you a tutor to ask at midnight. The Chrome extension pulls straight from Canvas and Blackboard. 5 million students use it, 4-day free trial then $9.99 a month.
Try this yourself:
Go to mindgrasp.ai and create a study session for one lecture or chapter.
Hit record in class or upload a PDF, slides or a YouTube link.
Open the flashcards and the quiz it generated and find what you don't know yet.
Ask the AI tutor the question you were too shy to ask in class.
Who it's for: students, and anyone who reads a chapter three times and still forgets it.
Everything else you shouldn't miss
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion: Jensen says the platform stays open and Nvidia chips won't be required, 18 million developers and 3 million models come with it.
OpenAI is putting $1 billion into defending utilities: Brockman told 300 security chiefs at OpenAI HQ that water systems, power companies and local governments get subsidized access to its models, training and support.
Altman says much more capable models are coming soon: he told Axios before the launch that no one intellectually honest can look at what's happening and not feel the weight of responsibility.
You can talk to your Gmail now: Gmail Live, Docs Live and Keep Live rolled out, ask your inbox a question on AI Plus and up, dictate a doc or brain-dump a list on Pro and Ultra.
AI layoffs dropped to 3,462 in August: lowest since December and the first month this year AI wasn't the top reason companies gave for cutting jobs.
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