A Goldman Sachs trading desk head sent out a research note over the weekend, and the whole thing boiled down to one point: GPT-6 Astra is the one the AI bull market has been waiting for. Just two days after its release, OpenAI called itself the world’s smartest, President Brockman announced, “Welcome to the AGI era,” ARC-AGI-3 self-testing came in at 99.9%, and on Friday Oracle and SoftBank were the first to rally in salute.
Looking closer, it’s all pretty awkward. That 99.9% score came from OpenAI’s own testing framework, basically like getting special treatment; put it in a unified neutral testing room and it drops straight to 62.7%. Two days earlier, Altman had just said AGI is at most a marketing term, only for his own president to turn around and declare that AGI has arrived. The rollout was also staggered in stages, with paying subscribers left waiting for days, so frustrated users got an apology after he went online and said the whole process was too chaotic.
Anthropic on the other side is even more subtle, with valuation expectations at $2 trillion and ambitions to stage the biggest IPO in history, but its prospectus was pushed from as early as next week to late September. Whether that was to avoid the heat is hard to say. OpenAI isn’t public, so retail investors like me are left with nothing but watching the show. Anyway, whose test room it is, whose questions they write, 99.9 or 62.7 — I can’t tell the difference.
Looking closer, it’s all pretty awkward. That 99.9% score came from OpenAI’s own testing framework, basically like getting special treatment; put it in a unified neutral testing room and it drops straight to 62.7%. Two days earlier, Altman had just said AGI is at most a marketing term, only for his own president to turn around and declare that AGI has arrived. The rollout was also staggered in stages, with paying subscribers left waiting for days, so frustrated users got an apology after he went online and said the whole process was too chaotic.
Anthropic on the other side is even more subtle, with valuation expectations at $2 trillion and ambitions to stage the biggest IPO in history, but its prospectus was pushed from as early as next week to late September. Whether that was to avoid the heat is hard to say. OpenAI isn’t public, so retail investors like me are left with nothing but watching the show. Anyway, whose test room it is, whose questions they write, 99.9 or 62.7 — I can’t tell the difference.