Reacción a "OpenAI’s new Astra model"

Statements by OpenAI executives suggesting that Astra marks the dawn of the era of artificial general intelligence (AGI) are a major marketing strategy designed to attract venture capital investment rather than representing the realisation of general intelligence.

These programmes are designed to mimic human language so effectively that they lead the public to project onto them a thinking mind, cognitive abilities or intentions that they do not actually possess. Regardless of how advanced GPT-6 Astra’s computational capabilities or agentic functionalities may be, the model remains a synthetic media generation machine that operates exclusively on linguistic form — the structure and mathematical probability of the data — without any real connection to meaning, let alone a thinking mind, that is to say, an artificial general intelligence comparable to or superior to human intelligence.

In fact, the very concept of ‘general artificial intelligence’ is problematic, as there are a multitude of different definitions. OpenAI has historically defined it in functional terms: highly autonomous systems capable of outperforming humans in most economically valuable tasks. But demonstrating that a model satisfies such a broad definition requires more than simply achieving exceptional results on certain benchmarks or performing spectacular demonstrations.

In fact, independent analyses have pointed out that Astra achieves very mixed results on other benchmarks. For example, competing models such as Anthropic’s Claude 5.1 continue to lead on certain metrics that measure the ability to develop software, whilst Astra actually showed a decline in quality compared to its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Sol, when tackling other benchmarks.

Furthermore, some of its most spectacular results require additional tools, memory and components based on techniques distinct from those of large language models. In other words, it is a neurosymbolic AI rather than a pure LLM. Therefore, we are by no means dealing with general artificial intelligence. Talking about general artificial intelligence, as OpenAI does, is a marketing strategy.

But there is a much more specific problem on which all experts seem to agree: the more capable these systems are of acting autonomously, the more difficult it can be to determine what they are doing. This aspect is particularly relevant in the case of Astra. OpenAI itself acknowledges that the new model presents a reduced ability to monitor its operation, and this is not good news. Security teams, including those at Redwood Research and the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), have highlighted this as a dangerous step backwards in terms of the transparency and accountability of these systems when things go wrong.