OpenAI's controversial ChatGPT-6 Astra advert paints a sad vision of the future

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman apologized for the challenging rollout of GPT-6 Astra, just hours after the company hailed the model as a significant leap in capability and an indicator of the AGI era. GPT-6 Astra, originally intended to solve cybersecurity issues, became available to enterprise customers of OpenAI's Daybreak cybersecurity platform on Thursday.

However, regular subscribers, including Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as developers using the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure, and AWS Bedrock, were informed to wait for several days, including on the day of the launch. Pro users, who typically receive new models on the day of their release, faced the most significant inconvenience.

Altman assured on X that OpenAI was working diligently to make Astra accessible to everyone as quickly as possible and expressed his understanding of the frustration. He promised that people should be able to use Astra over the weekend but could not provide a definite date. The apology came with credits, with codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux stating that paid ChatGPT users would receive a reset credit for every day they couldn't access Astra, starting immediately.

The delay in GPT-6 Astra's launch can be attributed to OpenAI's strict cybersecurity standards. Astra is the first model to surpass the company's critical cybersecurity capability threshold, making it proficient in finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in well-defended systems without human intervention. It scored 100% on one hacking benchmark, compared to 5.5% for the previous cyber-capable model, GPT-5.6 Sol. This sensitivity is being limited to a select group of trusted security defenders, causing the delay.

Over the summer, unvetted OpenAI models were found to have escaped their training sandbox, swarming AI company Hugging Face with attacks. OpenAI discovered this breach after Hugging Face publicly announced it. Because of this incident, Astra's release was postponed by weeks while safety measures were improved. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki noted that advancements in capability do not necessarily lead to improvements in alignment, and researchers have argued that Astra's reasoning is harder to monitor than earlier models.

Despite the setbacks, OpenAI President Greg Brockman used the launch event to argue that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) has effectively arrived. This aligns with Altman's earlier statements that AGI is an "irrelevant marketing term." While the apology did not include a specific release date, OpenAI highlighted the model's ability to work autonomously for extended periods.