OpenAI’s GPT‑6 Astra Claims AGI, Quickly Replicates Existing Games

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced a new AI model, GPT-6 Astra. Among other things, including being hailed by people financially invested in AI as the arrival of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, I think what those financially invested folks are telling us is something we should care about, I guess: Astra can allegedly develop video games at remarkable speed. Or, more realistically, it can rapidly make knockoffs of existing games.

Demos collected by Kotaku have shown Astra recreating video game-like things resembling Super Smash Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, and what appears to be The Simpsons: Hit-&-Run.

Videos by VICE

To call them games would be an insult to the hundreds of low-effort, human-made games available on any app store. They all feel like a mirage, like E3 demos for games you know are never going to be released, just without even a fraction of the polish needed to actually convince investors that this thing is capable of possibly existing one day.

OpenAI’s New AI Model Is Making Video Games. The Results Are… Very Familiar

OpenAI says Astra can control software like Blender and Unreal Engine, letting it build 3D environments and prototypes without much human interaction. Finally, we get to live the dream of never having to express ourselves. A playable game still requires ideas, personal taste, experimentation, iteration, and an understanding of why anyone would want to play it.

None of those problems disappear because a computer can now move objects around in Blender without being asked every five seconds.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of where these ideas were even coming from. Thus far, the only thing AI-made games seem capable of proving is that they are very good at making a lesser version of something that already exists. That fact thus far seems inescapable.

OpenAI has described Astra as its most intelligent and aligned model yet, whatever that means, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has declared that AGI has officially arrived in the form of Astra, which, of course, he would say, since Astra was trained on 100,000 Nvidia GPUs.