Sep 8, 2026
OpenAI calls GPT-6 Astra a generational leap, with company president Greg Brockman declaring, “Welcome to the AGI era.” But OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki is sounding a very different note. In his essay “An Alien Mind,” Pachocki warns that no one is prepared for the consequences of rapidly rising...
Project Synapse: Astra, AGI Hype, Model Costs, and AI’s Real-World Utility (Plus Education & Safety)
Sep 5, 2026
Jim Love hosts Project Synapse with John Pinard and University of Waterloo professor Doug Sparks, reviewing a week of intense AI model releases led by OpenAI’s Astra (called a “generational leap” by Greg Brockman) and debating what “AGI-ish” could mean, including Sam Altman’s definition tied to commercially...
Sep 4, 2026
OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra on the same day ChatGPT and Codex suffered a widespread outage lasting just over two hours.
There is no evidence the outage was caused by Astra, but the timing was striking. OpenAI is describing Astra as a major step forward, with stronger agentic abilities, advanced...
Sep 3, 2026
im Love covers the biggest tech stories for Thursday, September 3.
Google has again avoided a court-ordered breakup. A federal judge rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to force the sale of Google’s AdX advertising exchange, choosing behavioural remedies instead. The two sides now have 30 days to work on final...
Sep 2, 2026
A Microsoft 365 outage that began with Exchange Online spread across Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Copilot, Purview, Defender XDR and administrative tools. Microsoft traced the disruption to an authentication configuration error affecting shared infrastructure.
Linux kernel maintainers are being overwhelmed by automated...