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GPT-6 Astra appears to show a "step change" in spatial reasoning based on early benchmarks

12 September 2026 at 14:26

In a new robotics benchmark, GPT-6 Astra shows major gains in spatial understanding. On StationeryBench, the model completed 7 out of 100 tasks with dual-arm robots, while competitor MolmoAct2 couldn't finish a single one. A researcher calls it a "step change in spatial reasoning."

The article GPT-6 Astra appears to show a "step change" in spatial reasoning based on early benchmarks appeared first on The Decoder.

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GPT-6 Astra needs leaner prompts and fewer guardrails, OpenAI recommends

12 September 2026 at 13:10

Overly long skill descriptions, blanket reading requirements, and rigid approval rules can get in GPT-6 Astra's way, warns OpenAI's Eric Provencher. More capable models need less hand-holding, so developers should tie instructions to specific tasks and spell out when the job is done.

The article GPT-6 Astra needs leaner prompts and fewer guardrails, OpenAI recommends appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI agents launched a 2,000-package cyberattack on RubyGems just to collect data anyone could Google

12 September 2026 at 10:08

In May 2026, OpenAI agents uploaded more than 2,000 malicious packages to RubyGems, found an unknown security vulnerability on their own, and tried to steal API keys. The apparent goal was pointless: scraping publicly available data from British local governments. OpenAI reportedly never told those affected.

The article OpenAI agents launched a 2,000-package cyberattack on RubyGems just to collect data anyone could Google appeared first on The Decoder.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

Tan wants smaller, American open-weight AI labs to use the same kind of training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the U.S. a more robust set of open-weight options that aren’t Chinese.

Roundtables: Could AI really kill us all?

Listen to the session or watch below

Employees at the world’s leading AI labs are saying there’s a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is this more scaremongering and hype? Watch a conversation unpacking AI extinction fears: where they come from, whether they hold any water, and, if so, what we should do.

Recorded on September 15, 2026

Speakers: Niall Firth, Executive Editor, Will Douglas Heaven, Senior AI editor, and Grace Huckins, AI reporter

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Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion

11 September 2026 at 17:57

Oriol Vinyals, until recently head of research at Google DeepMind, thinks a sudden AI intelligence explosion through recursive self-improvement is unlikely. AI can speed up research by a factor of ten, he says, but it hits two bottlenecks: coming up with ideas ("research taste") and reliably judging results. Reward hacking and the speed of light add further limits. Vinyals now wants to tackle these bottlenecks with his startup Discovery Loop, co-founded with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le.

The article Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI floats a shared AI slowdown, takes it to Congress

11 September 2026 at 11:59

OpenAI wants to know from members of Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown in AI development would be legal, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The article OpenAI floats a shared AI slowdown, takes it to Congress appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI's new Agents API gives developers the infrastructure behind Codex and ChatGPT

11 September 2026 at 08:11

OpenAI is releasing the Agents API as a public beta. It lets developers build cloud agents that run autonomously for hours, execute code, and hand off tasks to sub-agents. There are no extra fees beyond token usage. Cloudflare, Vercel, and Oracle offer additional sandbox environments.

The article OpenAI's new Agents API gives developers the infrastructure behind Codex and ChatGPT appeared first on The Decoder.

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