OpenAI Eyes AGI by End-2026; Pachocki: Astra Is the AI Research Intern
Latent Space · rss · 2026-08-28
Latent Space's AI News digest leads with OpenAI's AGI timeline: Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki says the unreleased Astra model is the "Automated AI Research Intern" he targeted for September 2026, and Sam Altman tells TIME they'll likely declare AGI achieved internally by December 2026.
Other highlights:
- Microduck breakout: Pollen Robotics + Hugging Face's $399, 25cm open-source biped with 15 actuators, camera/LiDAR/NFC sensors, a public simulator for sim2real — selling one every 5 seconds, $1M in sales.
- Ox Alpha revealed as Zhipu's GLM-5.3-Flash: 320B total / 18B active params, 1M context, hybrid attention; community got 3-bit GGUF running on 128GB RAM, 4-bit retains 93% accuracy on a 256GB Mac.
- Video gen race: Google's Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash (40s scene extension, first/last-frame control, 4K upscale) hits #1 on Text-to-Video Arena; fal + MiniMax's H3 Max claims 15s of video in 5s.
- Agent infra: Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents + Vercel Chat SDK cookbook; Nous's Hermes Agent can browse with your real Chrome profile.
- Security: OpenAI's open letter on cyber defense signed by 116 orgs; DeepMind pilots double-blind frontier evals; more details on the OpenAI/HF agent incident.
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- Chollet backs Gakku: conversational AI as the biggest education leap of our generation — fchollet · 2026-10-15
- AI-designed molecular scissors cut Alzheimer's proteins — but is it really AI? — gerardsans · 2026-10-15
- Subbarao Kambhampati to dissect the 'mythos of LLM thinking tokens' at UMN — rao2z · 2026-10-15
- Pure-play AI firms' combined revenue — $500B or $1T — will decide if AGI takes off this decade — Jsevillamol · 2026-10-15