{"id":616547,"date":"2026-08-02T11:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T11:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/616547\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T11:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T11:22:12","slug":"openai-smuggled-the-announcement-of-astra-its-next-ai-model-into-a-blog-post-about-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/616547\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Smuggled the Announcement of Astra, Its Next AI Model, Into a Blog Post About Math"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI announced its next major AI model Saturday, and it did so in the third paragraph of a blog post called<\/a> \u201cTen advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science.\u201d<\/p>\n

The math results the post is touting, OpenAI writes, \u201cwere achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model.\u201d So there you go. It sounds like after GPT-5.6 Sol comes either GPT-5.6 Astra, or GPT-6 Astra, or\u2014who knows?\u2014just \u201cAstra\u201d and the whole GPT part gets scrapped? It\u2019s not spelled out.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s naming conventions suggest that this would be another GPT-5.6 release.\u00a0There\u2019s a GPT-5.6 Terra, which, as corny Latin-knowers are well aware, means \u201cearth,\u201d Luna which is Latin for \u201cmoon,\u201d and Sol, which is Latin for \u201csun.\u201d Astra means \u201cthe stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to an anonymously sourced story in the Information<\/a>, Astra boasts the ability to do \u201clong-running\u201d work. CEO Sam Altman was, the report claims, in Washington, D.C. over the past week, demoing the model to federal officials.<\/p>\n

Gizmodo asked OpenAI on Saturday for the official name of the model. We also asked OpenAI about the relationship between this model and another OpenAI model only vaguely described in one of that company\u2019s blog posts. We did not receive a reply.<\/p>\n

The \u201cunprecedented cyber incident\u201d covered in that July 21 blog post<\/a> is already infamous. An entity described as a \u201ccombination of OpenAI models \u2014 including GPT\u20115.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes\u201d compromised the AI resource depository Hugging Face during a model evaluation exercise that was supposed to remain inside OpenAI.<\/p>\n

A later update to the blog post clarified that the unreleased and unnamed model involved in the incident was an \u201cinternal-only research prototype and was never intended for public release,\u201d and that it had been \u201cdeactivated, encrypted, and restricted.\u201d So to be clear, Astra is not the model that broke into Hugging Face.<\/p>\n

Gizmodo asked OpenAI on Saturday to more fully clarify the relationship or lack thereof between Astra and the never-to-be-released model. We did not receive responses in time for publication, but will update if we receive a clarifying answer.<\/p>\n

As for the blog post about math, it comes with a paper<\/a>. There are ten proofs covered, covering such topics as the \u201casymptotic strength of the Cohn\u2013Elkies linear program,\u201d for sphere-packing, which OpenAI purports to be \u201cdetermined exactly.\u201d That sounds very cool, but I\u2019m just the guy who blogs nights and weekends for Gizmodo.<\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, OpenAI published a mathematical disproof back in May<\/a>, purportedly solved by an unnamed OpenAI model. For the most part, math folks wrote about the model\u2019s work approvingly, but didn\u2019t seem completely knocked out.<\/p>\n

For instance, Harvard mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood wrote<\/a> that OpenAI\u2019s proof was, \u201ca beautiful application of number theory to a natural, concrete question,\u201d but she also said the problem, described by OpenAI<\/a> as \u201ca central conjecture in discrete geometry\u201d was nothing she had ever heard of before. She added:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThis result does not show us all the times AI has claimed to have a proof of something and been wrong. Without that context (which many of us have just from personal experience), it is also easy to draw incorrect conclusions about the current state of AI and research mathematics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI announced its next major AI model Saturday, and it did so in the third paragraph of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,19,17,9657,307,82],"class_list":["post-616547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-math","tag-openai","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117025659045495937","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}