The first GPT-6 model

and what I’m building with it

Sep 08, 2026

Hey folks,

So Astra is out and, in my experience, a token-hungry monster of a model… I was playing around with it over the weekend and burned through 4Bn tokens and built…nothing really.

I also wasted my banked resets too and feel annoyed at myself for just throwing all sorts of requests at it (long-running and short).

I don’t know yet if it feels to me like a huge capability leap but every time a new model comes out I always think it must be my skill issue. I’ve seen some awesome demos on X of people building insane looking things (seems like everyone is building 3d worlds and games?).

Two things I one-shot that I’ll share because I’m not sure what to do with them yet:

‘forgotten devices’ - these images were created by the image generation tool (which is pretty nuts!). My idea was to have a bunch of these and then you could click and play with each one (if I had any tokens left).

p.s. you can see in the bottom left the 3 version my agent made (I always have 3 versions created when starting an idea so I can feel out which direction I like best).

‘world radio’ - an old ipod interface that plays radio stations live from around the world. Not sure what I was going to do here but it works pretty well (some rough edges like the top button wtf?! 😂 )

I’m going to spend some time this week trying to figure out some of the better ways to work with Astra (other than letting it use tons of tokens), and I’ll let you know my experience.

Headlines

Astra is the start of the GPT-6 family. It smokes ARC-AGI-3, scores the highest on Zapier’s AutomationBench and costs the same as Fable 5.1. Though it’s a spiky model, it’s not consistently great.

It is a show horse, not a workhorse - Kieran Klaassen
I both love and absolutely detest this model - Theo

But I’m hopeful because this was exactly the case with the GPT-5 release. By the time we got to GPT-5.3, i.e. in a few months, that model was consistently great.

Astra can draw a portrait in Canva - yes, the way you and I would draw using a computer (but obviously much better). Its computer use is fast enough to play piano.

Other things people are doing with Astra:

Rebuilding Manhattan in Unreal Engine.
Generating UIs autonomously.
3d printing a custom shower-drain part.
Identifying sounds from spectrograms (i.e. pictures with sound frequencies)
and dozens of examples of modelling real-life products in Blender or similar tools.

Also, in Codex, Astra can now ask questions without waiting for the answers. It carries on with everything that doesn’t need your answer (or where the answer can be assumed), and uses your reply without losing track of the original task.

OpenAI also said it has reached its automated research intern goal. These agents can tackle research tasks that would take a skilled person several days, while humans set the direction and judge the results. The next target is an automated AI researcher by March 2028.

You should soon be able to change the way Claude Code behaves. Anthropic is testing a way to extend its functionality by letting Claude Code write plugins that can change the interface, log actions or restrict what agents are allowed to do. It hasn’t shipped yet, and the Claude Code team is looking for feedback.

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