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Today in AI news, OpenAI has reportedly released GPT-6 Astra. Rumors on X suggests that it scores 99% on Arc-AGI-3, meaning that the benchmark is essentially dead now. For comparison, Fable only scored 30%. Does this mean AGI is here? Many are saying that it is. Color me skeptical, but its getting harder and harder to find concrete tests that AI cannot pass. The god of the gaps gets smaller.
Many intelligenct people have important things to say about this. But what do the 84 year old communists think? Bernie Sanders today has introduced legislation calling for a ban on superintelligence with a 20 year prison term for attempted superintelligence. He also wants (shocked Pikachu) a government regulatory agency. Although he mumbles something about international cooperation, its clear that China will not be subject to these rules so it solves nothing.
I will give him credit for at least recognizing the importance of the issue.
We could be entering a world of unimaginable change. And, given the political systems in place in the US and China, the midwives of that changes will be those on the cusp of senility.
Chollet is explicitly building these things to find the remaining gaps. His position:
That was back in February. He expected ARC-3 to be solved by ≈Q1 2027. And on the other hand, labs are directly targeting these benchmarks, which he also expected. But it doesn't really matter, they're targeting everything now, hill-climbing every hill that can be described and measured. There's too much compute to leave any stone unturned, and models are much too fast and good at autonomous coding. Is this "AGI"? Well, what is "AGI"? Beats me. There are retarded definitions about "all things a human can do", clearly they cannot jerk off, for starters. Also they'll remain bounded on nonsense cognitive tasks.
What this is is an intelligence, with peak human or narrowly superhuman abilities in a wide range of wildly economically useful domains. This is enough to keep accelerating.
This phase change will, in a pretty short order, propagate down the line. The first model to go past 60% on ARC-AGI-2 was Opus 4.6. From 64.6% for $2.25/task to 68.8% for $3.64. February 5, 2026. To date, no open model does better. But DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 (31st of July, obviously) does 61.4% for $0.042, up from 4.0%/$0.120 that V3.2 had in December 2025. I think that in about 8-9 months they (or GLM, or Moonshot, or Qwen) will be where Astra is, and put Astra-level models on Huggingface. This is just a neat illustration of the compression of the timeline. In a year, all this will be cheap as dirt, utterly commoditized and trivial. OpenAI will be doing more interesting things.
I don't quite understand what Sanders is thinking. He's a Western Communist, so I guess it stands to reason he's not talking much sense.
I'm actually not sure about that. They won't be subject to Sanders' asinine rules, but if I were them, I'd be pretty spooked about all this. They're buck naked. Machines that can bulldoze through unsolved math can go harder on their non-airgapped datacenters and all internet-connected devices, likely without them noticing. If the US credibly proposed a pause, I think they might have taken it at this point (though; how would a pause help them develop defenses if they're weaker and vulnerable already? They'd ask for differential thresholds).
But why would the US propose anything like this? This is literally the coolest thing ever.
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