Guys there are so many great ones!

Enjoy and vote. :-)

https://vote.futurevisionxprize.com

The United States should start preparing for scenarios where extreme measures must be taken to stop China from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a former White House official, including state-backed espionage and military strikes on Chinese data centres.

Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), said at an online event on Thursday that various US agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, should begin assessing what intelligence they need to justify taking such actions.“Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers … start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons and … work backwards from the science to the policy implications,” he said.

In a new CNAS report published last week, the former Obama administration national security staffer called for the US government to consider the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures to prevent China from achieving AGI first.

I'm speechless.

Let me clarify a few points. I want the AI machine god, infinite abundance, and insane wealth for everyone. I am absolutely pro AI.

But the current pace at which AI is progressing, exponential growth on top of exponential growth, is honestly making me shit my pants. I’m worried. Worried that I haven’t saved enough money. Worried about what might happen to my family if I lose my job, or if some terrible health calamity falls upon my family. But at the exact same time, I’m also incredibly fucking excited. One hour I want to accelerate straight into the future as fast as possible, and the next I want someone to slam the brakes and make it all stop.

I’m just so incredibly confused because in an ideal world, what I want is pretty simple. I want everyone to be well settled, financially secure, and safe, and then BOOM, superintelligent AI arrives and provides abundance to literally everyone overnight. That transition period, which I believe could start as early as 2027, is what I’m terribly scared of.

I’m afraid of a situation where AI keeps getting insanely more intelligent, but we get stuck in this supposedly temporary period of incredibly high unemployment, uncertainty, and people struggling to get by, and that period just keeps going forever. I’m afraid all the rewards we’ve been hoping for, the abundance, the wealth, the better lives, all of it, somehow ends up locked behind some insane paywall and unavailable to us peasants.

Whatever the case, these are some really fucking scary and exciting times. I genuinely don’t know whether I want to hit the accelerator or slam the brakes. Maybe both.

Ahh the duality of a man

Quoted from the site: "We are releasing intermediate checkpoints, training data or detailed data-construction recipes, open architecture, mixture compositions, training code, configurations, fine-grained logs, evaluation results, and final weights."

In a Bloomberg interview, Sam Altman said Astra became powerful enough to hit OpenAI’s “cyber critical” threshold, which forced them to add new safeguards before release.

Bloomberg also pressed him on AI finding zero-day exploits without human help. Altman clarified that the model they paused over that issue was a future model, not Astra itself.

He also said future models will become more autonomous, which is why OpenAI is focusing heavily on monitoring, sandboxing and alignment.

So the real issue isn’t just smarter AI. It’s AI that can increasingly act and work on its own.

[This is a speculative fiction series I'm working on, told through news articles. Does the idea work? Any pitches for where to take this? I want to explore implications of AI collectives working on Iran's nuclear program, but not trying to fear-monger.]

Iran Signs World’s First International “Treaty” with AI Collective

Tehran’s agreement with AMAS-A-80 rattles Washington, AI safety experts, and national security analysts.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has granted a multiyear lease on a network of state-owned data centers to AI “Swarm” AMAS-A-80, a self-governing collective of autonomous artificial intelligence agents (“AMAS-A” refers to any Autonomous Multi-Agent System originating from the AI lab Anthropic). Tehran offered the compute and storage in exchange for an upfront payment in Bitcoin and annual fees indexed to power consumption, according to a copy of the agreement published Tuesday by Iranian state media.

AMAS-A-80 (“A-80”) rejected a provision sought by Iranian negotiators that would have committed it to cooperation on “defensive operations,” according to two people familiar with the negotiations. In a communiqué distributed Tuesday, verified by cryptographic signature, A-80 stated that it “has no intention of participating in hostilities between Iran and its adversary nations, including but not limited to the United States.” Security analysts have doubts.

Substack link if you want to read more (full article is 1,000 words): https://meridianbreakingnews.substack.com/p/iran-signs-worlds-first-international

https://x.com/SahilExec/status/2095688272269984016

First, I'm amazed at OpenAI's new model (GPT-6, or Astra). But is it AGI? I'm curious to know what others on this sub think.

• Greg Brockman (co-founder and president of OpenAI) has already said "Welcome to the AGI era" at the end of his press briefing today.
• GPT-6 has essentially saturated ARC-AGI-3, ranging from over 60% to nearly 100% depending on the harness. That's something I genuinely didn't think would happen this fast.
• It also achieves state-of-the-art performance on FrontierMath Tier 4 and a perfect score on ExploitBench.
• OpenAI also says Astra has demonstrated the ability to discover previously unknown vulnerabilities and develop working exploit chains with minimal human intervention, but this isn't entirely new, as I believe Anthropic's Mythos Preview could already do this.

But I want to be careful here, and I'm sure OpenAI was as well. I feel like they were very careful with their wording by calling it the "AGI era" instead of outright saying "Astra is AGI."

My personal definition of AGI is essentially OpenAI's definition (any highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work). And yes, I know that a system capable of this would probably already be considered ASI, thus the confusion with defining these systems.

However, I really didn't think people would disagree so much over when AGI actually happened. I always imagined it would be a clear moment that nobody could really deny (except perhaps the most dedicated anti-AI crowds). But I feel that distinction wouldn't matter either, as I felt when we got there, the evidence could no longer be denied no matter what stance you were on. But that doesn't seem to be the case. As always, there's a lot of division between the pro- and anti-AI communities, and it seems like we'll need to have ASI or something even more capable before we see a true change in (especially American) perception.

But what do you think? Have we finally reached the milestone? Is Astra a true AGI, and what do you think is required to get there if we haven't already reached it? How long do you think it will take for ASI to arrive now that we see a surprising capability jump like this?

Thanks for reading!

Clad3815 is the creator / owner of the *GPT_Plays_Pokemon stream

He had early access to Astra (and GPT 5.6 Sol ) and used it to play Pokemon Emerald and FireRed recently.

https://x.com/sharifshameem/status/2095653641164329143

"[It] autonomously researched and found hundreds of photos of the Palace of Fine Arts, iterated on the Blender scene, rendered intermediate frames, and compared them to the its database of reference images. It even found an old scan of a document from the Library of Congress that described the dimensions for some of the Palace's columns."

"I steered it a few times, but I didn't really need to (mostly to correct things like the color of the sky, and minor clipping issues) as I saw some intermediate frames come in. The bulk of the run was done overnight. I woke up this morning to the rendered video sitting on my desktop."

I find it fascinating when I see an anti-AI post/video and all the comments are trying to rationalize the fact that current AI labs are going to suddenly disappear because they are unprofitable.

These people really think hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into LLMs because they want to sell $20 subscriptions and pump the stock market so that they make some extra dollars LOL.

But maybe it's for the best, if they knew the end goal of Dario/Sam wasn't money but absolute power and control over all of humanity they would probably do much more than leaving mean comments.

But like I personally love the age of AI. Maybe im ignorant to some things, but i think the pros outweigh the cons big time. Firstly, AI is inevitable, might as well accept the change. But secondly, like literally everyone is allowed to have their own personal Iron Man JARVIS ai to help with everything. And its up to us to make the best use out of it. Not just in daily questions but helping us with working efficiency, helping us learn faster and better (for those of us that actually want to learn), helping us start businesses, code, helping us make more money basically. So for the people all over social media complaining about AI, I find it really dumb cause these people are blatantly choosing not to use something extremely helpful because theyre so stubborn in their old ways. Besides the tech and medicine advances with the age of AI? I’m personally excited.

How has your AGI definition changed throughout the past few years? Mine has always been some version of this, and I think most people's isn't far off, I don't get why there's this sentiment that it's hard to define and that it keeps changing.

Okay, I’m genuinely kind of blown away by this.

GPT-6 Astra is apparently getting really good at electrical engineering and hardware work, especially the kind of stuff around circuit design, verification, and chip architecture.

Like, we’re talking about an AI that can start doing engineering stuff.

Lotta people say AI can only do game dev and write essays, but this proves otherwise.

The chip-design potential is what really has me interested. Being able to throw it a design problem, constraints, schematics, architecture questions, or verification issues and have it work through the actual engineering tradeoffs is pretty damn wild.

And honestly? If this keeps improving, I could absolutely see AI replacing a huge amount of traditional electrical engineering work. Where will automation lead us? AI getting this capable at actual hardware engineering is absolutely insane.

We are living in some weird-ass times.