GPT-6 Astra tops ErdosBench, but OpenAI says math wasn't the priority — recursive self-improvement is
The Decoder · rss · 2026-09-10
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops the ErdosBench for open math problems, yet chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says math was deliberately not a priority — OpenAI is pouring resources into recursive self-improvement and alignment research instead. The Decoder reads this as support for an increasingly "spiky" development path: extreme strength in select domains rather than broad progress, at least while AI still can't improve itself and needs targeted optimization on human-generated data.
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