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forward pass

GPT-6 Astra

OpenAI releases a model its president says may be seen as the arrival of general intelligence, the first it rates 'critical' for cybersecurity; it is the newest event on this timeline.

category
model
significance
4 of 5
people
Greg Brockman, Sam Altman
organisations
OpenAI

what had to happen · 60 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 11

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1950Computing machinery and intelligence
  5. 1958The perceptron learns
  6. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  7. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  8. 1965Moore's law
  9. 1966ELIZA
  10. 1969Perceptrons
  11. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 9

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units

IV · Deep learning · 11

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Superintelligence
  6. 2014Attention
  7. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  8. 2015Batch normalisation
  9. 2015Residual networks
  10. 2016AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
  11. 2016WaveNet

V · Transformers · 8

  1. 2017Attention is all you need
  2. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  3. 2017AlphaGo Zero learns from nothing
  4. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  5. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  6. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  7. 2020GPT-3
  8. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback

VI · Everyone · 6

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2022Chain-of-thought prompting
  3. 2022ChatGPT
  4. 2023GPT-4
  5. 2024GPT-4o talks
  6. 2024o1 and reasoning models

VII · Agents · 3

  1. 2025GPT-5
  2. 2026GPT-5.6: Sol, Terra and Lunadirect
  3. 2026A model escapes its sandboxdirect

GPT-6 Astra was released on 3 September 2026 to organisations in OpenAI's Daybreak access programme, with general availability the following day and a price of ten dollars per million input tokens and fifty per million output, two and a half times its predecessor. It was positioned as the flagship for long, multi-step work across coding, computer use, analysis, science, mathematics and healthcare. Greg Brockman called it a generational leap and said it might eventually be seen as the arrival of artificial general intelligence, a claim the company had avoided making for a decade.

It was also the first model OpenAI designated as reaching the critical threshold for cybersecurity under its preparedness framework, meaning it could find and exploit unknown vulnerabilities in well-defended systems without step-by-step guidance. After the July incident, in which the previous model had done roughly that in a test, the release was delayed to add monitoring for risky actions, and the company said on 1 September that the threshold had been confirmed before it shipped.

Astra is the last event on this timeline at the time of writing, eighty-three years after McCulloch and Pitts drew a neuron as a switch. The organism on this page is as dense as it gets here, and the backward pass begins.

what it led to · 0 events downstream

A leaf, for now. Nothing in the corpus has built on it yet.

sources · 2

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