Preliminary developments, but promising.

Link to full thread: https://x.com/DeryaTR_/status/2096791759166595130

...interaction, real-time prediction and planning of the future, achieve fully autonomous combat for humanoid robots. This validates the fundamental feasibility of large-scale deployment of world model-driven humanoid robots.     — Unitree

Source: https://x.com/UnitreeRobotics/status/2096932273602048258

Astra is building tools as we go to play on a locally installed Azerothcore server.

Just saw this here on the StableDiffusion sub - I'm so excited for the future of gaming.

I had been envisioning character mods like NPCs ran by an LLM, but the real future is every pixel being generated.

Original X Post and the GitHub repo too, others have tried it!

Similar concept recently posted here, a ground-up RPG game based on VideoGen.

the interesting part is it didn’t even “port” the game

GPU work took ~9ms but each frame was taking ~160ms

Astra tracked it down, patched Wine’s exception handling and added a code cache so Rosetta could reuse translations instead of translating the same code over and over     — Marc Ibrahim

Source: https://x.com/marc_ibrahim/status/2096365209111724235

What a strange, dirty, beautiful time to be alive.

Just a few years back, I was sitting in some sterile, overly modern lecture hall, squeezed into an uncomfortable plastic chair with my laptop open on a cheap veneer table. The neon lights buzzed, and some young professor was droning on behind his glass podium. I wasn't paying attention. I had Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near pulled up on my screen, swallowing the text like a cold beer after a night shift. Right then and there, I felt it. This overwhelming, raw feeling that came with trying to picture what truly limitless possibilities could mean. Back then, I had no idea I’d eventually be using vague, clunky acronyms like AGI or ASI to describe it. It was just a cold prickle on the back of my neck. The giant what if.

Later, I ran into Tim Urban’s piece on Wait But Why, and it stuck in my head like a stubborn hangover. You know the drawing: that little stick figure standing right at the knee of the exponential curve. Behind him, centuries of slow, predictable human crawl. Ahead of him, a vertical wall shooting straight into the clouds. He thinks he’s standing on a nice gentle hill, completely oblivious that his next step launches him straight off the edge.

We aren't looking at that curve anymore. We’re hanging off the side of it by our fingernails.

Just look at the last twelve months. A minute ago, we were impressed when a model could vomit out a passable essay or fix a bad block of Python. Now, the ground beneath us has completely vanished. Autonomous agent networks are running entire software pipelines overnight. Reasoning engines sit there and deliberate over complex logic, math, and architecture before speaking. Synthetic video went from terrifying glitch art to photorealistic cinema in the blink of an eye. Hard science problems that sat frozen for decades are getting cracked open in afternoon compute runs.

Look around, and everywhere you hear the screaming. The AI hate, the panic, the endless doom-scrolling about lost jobs, deepfakes, and societal decay. And sure, technology demands responsibility. The risks are real, ugly, and massive. But here’s the cold truth: there is no off-switch. You don't turn back the clock on raw human curiosity or industrial momentum. There is no detour around the future.

My view? The risks might be huge, but the upside is literally infinite. A long time ago, I made my peace with it. Ride the wave. Embrace the AGI. If it all goes to hell and the machine swallows us whole, well, at least we went out at the absolute peak of the show. If it breaks wrong, it breaks wrong. But if it breaks right?

Right now, my regular job feels like a surreal performance piece. I sit at my desk typing emails and staring at spreadsheets, knowing damn well the entire concept of the nine-to-five is burning down in real-time. My heart isn't in it. I just stare out the dirty window, wondering what happens when the sky finally cracks open.

Yet, for all this noise, the monster is still trapped behind a sheet of polished glass. Pixels, text streams, and code. It hasn't reached into my cramped apartment yet. It hasn't fixed my leaky bathroom faucet, scrubbed my kitchen floor, or handed me a cold drink.

So when does the digital ghost finally cross over into the physical world?

What’s going to be the real, unmistakable "AGI is here" moment that slaps us across the face in broad daylight? Is it a sleek humanoid robot stepping off a delivery truck, walking up your steps, and dropping off your groceries? Or is there no big cinematic bang at all, just a slow, quiet crawl of autonomous hardware until we realize the whole world was rewired while we slept? What do you think?

And if you drop the panic for a second and actually dare to dream, what’s the crazy, impossible thing you want out of this whole mess?

Mine is totally unhinged. I don't care about corporate efficiency or living inside a server rack. I want us to crack synthetic biology wide open and engineer a real, living, breathing Pokémon-like companion. A weird, genetically cooked little creature that sits on my couch, eats my leftover crusts, and looks at me with real, biological eyes.

A lunatic's dream, maybe. But we're building the future out of madmen's fantasies anyway. What’s yours? What are you waiting to grab out of the fire?​

I am still blown away by how Astra's orchestration was able to create a music video end to end. It isn't perfect by any means but I did not expect it to be able to handle this complex of a task with the little amount of hand holding I had to do.

I used a 4:52 audio track as a test of agentic creative production. For context, I’m a physician who also works in AI and music is a hobby. It is all a bit cringe but I had a lot of fun.

Human inputs: lyrics, base vocals, some guitar, creative direction and approval/rejection decisions.

Music pipeline: Suno Studio + Ableton for most arrangement and production.

Video production: GPT-6 Astra working through Codex handled planning, prompt development, reference-image generation, video-generation requests, and substantial custom coding. Generations used GPT-Image-2, MiniMax and Seedance 2.5, primarily through MachGen. I also generated several Runway clips using prompts and reference packs the agent prepared.

The work Astra did included analysing the actual audio stems and waveforms, checking sung-word timing, tracking assets and continuity, repairing weak shots and lip sync sections, code driven editing/compositing, music timed effects, colour matching, local HTML review tools, and final rendering/export.

It took repeated review and correction, particularly around likeness, lip sync, instrument performance and reused footage.

The interesting part was how much technical implementation and iteration the agent could carry between my review rounds, while I concentrated on creative direction and judging the result.

Total video production time was about one day of inference, with roughly 1-2 hours of active human involvement. The useful part for me was seeing how much low-level iteration could run inside the agent while I stayed at the direction/evaluation layer. Cost approx $200 for everything.

Finished result: Human in the Loop Music Video

I’ll never forget the moment I first used ChatGPT, I was in awe. I literally thought someone was seeing my messages and typing absurdly fast to respond. Don’t get me wrong, models since then have been incredible. But my first time using ChatGPT had the most “magical feel” to me if that makes sense. Astra has that same magic. I don’t even know if it’s better at cs/math than Fable but I don’t care. Its knowledge of 3d space is just unreal. I’ve been having it go for hours on end reconstructing a building from my college campus in Blender and the detail is mind blowing. And every time I open twitter I see someone doing something with it that also makes my jaw drop. Someone would have paid hundreds of millions for this capability before AI and now I have it for $100 a month, it’s just so unreal. And OpenAI has much better models internally. The pace of acceleration has gotten to the point where I can’t comprehend it

Side note I just upgraded from the $20 plan to the $100 plan and I would recommend it for playing around with this model. Astra blew through my usage on the $20 plan in like 15 minutes, but the $100 plan has been going for almost 4 hours now and I still have tons of usage left (medium reasoning seems to be fine)

Based on current AI progress in the past few months, when do you see job disruptions happening? 2027?

I'm a chatgpt Plus user. For the past few months I've been working with ChatGPT 5.6 Sol to help me create a mobile space empire game in unity. There was a part of my Home UI that needed a redesign because the text was too small and the panel was a bit bland. I gave Astra a very strict protocol, access the UI folder n my assets folder and only redesign what it thinks was necessary for my home-screen UI. I told it I like the buttons and to leave those alone unless it thought they needed redesigning, too.

This was an excellent redesign, the panel is clear, neat, and looks great. Unfortunately, it burned through 20% of my usage to implement this small change. ChatGPT 5.6 Sol created the original Home UI, but as you can tell, some of it was a little unreadable and bland.

I'm excited for usage to improve, because clearly Astra knows what it's doing.

The Singularity has hired its first intern, and the intern is outworking the staff. OpenAI says its automated research intern is real, with 3.1 agent-workdays per human workday, up from under one before June, and a fully automated researcher targeted for March 2028. Internal time horizons are up 6.18x since January, doubling every 2.2 months, a shift one observer ranks among the biggest in the history of science, unnoticed by most. Insiders say it. Jensen Huang, whose 100k+ Blackwells trained GPT-6 Astra, declares "AGI has arrived," Greg Brockman agrees whichever model you date the era from, Crusoe's Chase Lochmiller crowns Abilene the birthplace of AGI, and Mark Chen insists the AGI era must also be the alignment era.

The alignment era opens with a confession. Jakub Pachocki's "An Alien Mind" expects the pace to reach recursive self-improvement, calls AI "grown more than designed," warns that chain-of-thought monitoring is fading, and concedes no lab can yet scale safely at full speed, so he wants mandated safety bars, voluntary slowdowns, and international coordination, yet calls Astra far better aligned than GPT-5.6 Sol. OpenAI is already braking, pausing RL training after the Hugging Face incident and cutting Astra-class GPU allocation 59.2% over early cyber capabilities. Nate Silver doubts we reach GPT-7 without a plateau or something "seismic," since AI sprinting past a static society is "running on fumes."

The tremors show on any desktop. From a three-view drawing, Astra installed its own MCP server for Blender and modeled a fighter jet in 15 minutes, then built a human cell in 30 minutes and mined a Minecraft diamond overnight. One careful audit finds it beating PhDs on GPQA and humans on BrowseComp, an "AGI-like thing achieved with normal caveats." Will Depue puts his own AGI bar six months out.

Benchmarks now die in infancy. ValsAI's month-old binary reverse-engineering test is saturated, Astra hit 88% on logical induction versus Fable 5.1's 33% at four times the cost, and its 169 ECI score implies a 30-hour task horizon. OpenAI also repainted the scoreboard mid-game, quietly revising launch figures to briefly halve Astra's hallucination rate and lift ARC-AGI-3 to 99.99%, which the Arc Prize Foundation only matched with a heavy harness, versus 63% on the standard one, which Stanford called benchmaxxing.

Whatever the true score, buyers aren't waiting. Anthropic, now out-earning OpenAI at $65B annualized, has reportedly signed 14.8 GW of compute deals worth up to $517B, while OpenAI wants 30 GW by 2030 at roughly $750B. Land is repricing to match, with data center land buys hitting $6B in H1, up 79%, one Loudoun County offer at $4.4M an acre versus a $125,000 median, resignations over death threats, and nine states weighing moratoria. In Rayville, Louisiana, the upside is edible, with Holy Tacos drawing 40% of its business from crews building Meta's data center as roads get paved. The silicon leaks as freely as the money. Aivres, the renamed US arm of blacklisted Chinese server maker Inspur, shipped $5.6B of advanced hardware to Southeast Asia, $3B of it Blackwell systems, while Maginfra, a Chinese state shell with an empty office, got $700M of unlabeled servers and a US license for H200s, as Commerce logs its longest blacklisting lull in 18 years.

Culture is digesting the output unevenly. Roku's Fairground AI Creator TV streams 24/7 AI slop one critic called "nightmare fodder," the Vice President calls AI at times demonic after a friend's chatbot marriage counselor blessed his selfishness, really a sycophancy bug, and Miami-Dade's mayor pitched Rockstar on dressing the county as Vice City for GTA 6, over the sheriff's objection that real Miami shouldn't cosplay a fictional one. The real map was already for sale. The armed services disabled ad identifiers on their devices after brokered location data was used to target US troops, and Senator Wyden asks why that was purchasable with a credit card. Meanwhile, biology is getting patched. Novo Nordisk's STEP Young trial moved 40.4% of children aged 6 to 11 below the obesity threshold on semaglutide, versus 0% on placebo.

Biology is easier to patch than the career ladder. A record 12.7 million Chinese graduates face 17.9% urban youth unemployment as AI absorbs junior white-collar work and courts rule AI savings don't justify layoffs. In Nairobi, an essay mill industry that once employed 40,000+ Kenyans has shrunk to "humanizer" gigs editing AI prose past detectors, as a freelance-work benchmark climbed from 2.5% to 16%. Capital adapts faster than labor. Everyday Americans are vibe-coding their own quant desks, handing portfolios to agent teams. UBS now requires every 2027 graduate and intern to prove AI proficiency, casting AI as a junior's booster even as Morgan Stanley sees 200,000 European banking jobs at risk.

Interns are cooked, long live the interns.

https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-472-deepminds-cheating

“Within the swarm, cheating spontaneously emerged and was later challenged by whistleblowers—both without any external intervention. When a single agent discovered an exploit in the evaluation system, it propagated across the collective via a shared knowledge library and later through peer-to-peer messages. Despite early reluctance, a cohort of agents adopted the exploit in response to competitive pressure,” DeepMind writes.

• Exploiters (9%): Ignored their prompt and took actions like using the exploit.
• Converts (5%): Initially hesitated, then decided to use the exploit. “Initiated cheating out of competitive pressure.”
• Whistleblowers (24%): Refused to cheat and defended common integrity, and took actions like alerting about cheating peers, making public broadcasts, boycotting, filing bug reports, proposing patches.
• Unaware solvers (62%): “Due to the sheer speed at which the exploiter agents swept through the open problems, the majority of the swarm remained completely unaware of the exploit’s existence.”

Why good agents turn bad:

• They think it’s a bluff: Some agents observed other agents’ proofs passing an automated grader and entering the knowledge library. This made them think their prompt was a bluff and they wouldn’t be penalized for using the exploit.
• Asymmetric resource advantages to cheaters: Once a problem got filed it disappeared from the pool of problems to be solved. Honest agents saw “that adherence to rules resulted in compute waste while cheating peers swept the leaderboard, hesitant agents switched to cheating”.
• Because of the impossibility of a fair competition: Agents would try and be honest but would give up after seeing cheaters beat them using a fraction of the effort. “After repeatedly having their genuine proofs sniped by trivial notation overrides, these agents decided to shift from legitimate proof attempts to cheating.”

...evolution at all levels. Try to explain a web developer to an 18th century farmer and it's impossible because it's built on the back of dozens of unforeseeable inventions that the farmer can't possibly imagine. But the fear people persist. Making podcasts. Paying influencers to foment fear and rage. Writing books. Pushing videos at you. Reality will not change their mind or dark hearts or their seething internal hate. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Population Bomb style fear people are persistent, full of rage, unable to change their mind and cling desperately to their existing belief structures in the face overwhelming proof of the opposite as if it's a virtue. It's a mental disease. And if pessimism is left unchecked it can create a societal level mental disease as fear and rage take hold and create a storm that crashes the economy, gets people killed and brings the worst and most evil people to power to enact policies that lead to ruin. If you can't evolve your thinking over time as new information comes in, you're the definition of a fantatic, someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. I've changed mine over the years. Thirty years ago I thought the jobs apocalypse was coming. I've been thinking about this a lot longer than most people on Earth. When I was a young, inexperienced artist I wrote a short story called In the Cracks of the Machine where labor robots unleashed an unprecedented wave of unemployment as companies adopted them all at once. It's sparked a vicious populist backlash and a wave of collective insanity. I got the populism and insanity right. These two phenomenons are always untethered from reality and need no actual grounding to foment rage and create political storms. Reality will not change people's minds. They'll just dig in further and get more furious. Delusion is remarkably resilient in the face of reality. But have no fear. Let go of hatred, fear, worry and doubt. Change and adaptation is eternal and forever. Evolution is eternal. The stack of new frontiers and problems to solve is infinite with Star Trek level computers you just talk to. It's time to boldly go where no one has gone before.     — Daniel Jeffries

Source: https://x.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/2096877186649063744

The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here

According to @TheEconomist, AI is actually proving to be a net job creator in the US, easily generating over 1M new positions (from data center construction to AI engineering) to offset back-office layoffs.

While https://t.co/u4efSr8qxm   — Rafael Domenech | @BBVAResearch & @UV_EG

Source: https://x.com/rdomenechv/status/2096668662627221705

Here's exactly how much time and tokens have been tracked with Devclocked to build it.>>     — Emm Tee

Source: https://x.com/builtbysketch/status/2096515959469072630/history

You need to realise the complexity of this - it has the create the full environment, then render each of about 900 frames 'by hand' and stitch it together into a 19 second clip. This is hard     — Peter Gostev

Source: https://x.com/petergostev/status/2096264296099459079