OpenAI does a victory lap for its new AI model: 'Welcome to the AGI era'

OpenAI says that its new model has reached the AI industry's most sought-after milestone.

"Welcome to the AGI era," Greg Brockman, the company's president, said at the end of a press call announcing the arrival of OpenAI's Astra model on Thursday.

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a fuzzy concept that nonetheless has become a core goal for AI development. OpenAI defines it as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." The company pitched Astra as a major research breakthrough and a shift in what's possible to delegate to AI. It's rolling out to customers this week.

Brockman has described reaching AGI as a gradual process. On the Thursday call, he said that in the future, he thinks people will look back and think AGI was created "about this time, and I think it might be about this model."

"For me personally, I do think we're there," he said.

GPT-6 Astra comes about a year after OpenAI launched its GPT-5 model family and about two months after its most recent upgrades, dubbed GPT-5.6. The company called Astra "the world's most intelligent and aligned model," and a "step change in professional work."

The model will also improve ChatGPT's "computer use" abilities, the company said. OpenAI employees told Business Insider last month that those tools — which run tasks autonomously on a user's desktop computer or internet browser — have reached an inflection point. The blog post said Astra can fill out forms, format documents, schedule appointments, and operate software.