That matters because the business bet on AI is shifting from chatbots that tell workers what to do to agents that can actually do it. OpenAI says Astra can handle everything from tax preparation and apartment hunting to game development and architectural rendering. In one company test, it completed a job-search task in under three minutes that OpenAI estimated would take a human five hours.

The launch also came with a much bigger claim. OpenAI has spent years working toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which it defines as systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. With Astra, the company is now suggesting it has crossed that threshold. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters, “Welcome to the AGI era.”