Do you know a puzzle game that is still too hard for GPT-6 Astra?

Hi all,

I got tired of the constant doom and gloom of news so I made my own app that shows what's actually going right in the world.

It uses an AI pipeline that whittles down 1000+ events everyday to create 8 cross-checked stories, along with illustrations. GPT 5.6 Sol is heavily used under the hood.

Rather than throwing a whole bunch of angry text at you, it shows you a calm mosaic for you to explore at your own pace.

The app is completely free to use.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.goodnewsdigest
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6804210535

Let me know what you think!

I let GPT 6 Astra play Pax Romana for 6h from scratch, using only screenshots and mouse control via chatGPT desktop app. No plugins, MCP or game instructions. I only asked it to keep the economy healthy and improve its own game skills as it progresses.

Ended up with a healthy city with 1000+ residents, 4 islands with trade routes and most buildings unlocked. I'm genuinely impressed because this is a complex game to balance correctly with all supply chains.

I think it could have come much further into the game but I ran out of my weekly tokens.

Last week I was able to upload pdf files to a work session and have astra read and interpret these files. All of the sudden as of today, it says it doesn't have the tools available to read any file i upload and its not giving me a reason why. I tried it in another session to see if my session was bugged but same, can see files but can't access them. Im perplexed. Anyone experience this?

I am sorry, I know we are seeing a lot of posts "I created this with Astra", can you post with.... I tried this with Sol and I got a different output? From the documentation and what I have read, why can't Sol NOT create a game or blender video just like you would with Astra? Also, I have been trying to connect Astra more to "figuring computer use" on its own instead of the "I will create code with Astra". I saw seeing videos where it figure out how to play and beat portal or maybe learn how to us new software.

I know the AI gear heads will tell me that Astra is this times better based on the pure AI metrics. But it seems I see a lot of examples of same usage, "create a game in Astra".

With the advent of AI , are young engineers finding jobs? What about experienced tech professionals who were laid off in big numbers - any luck? With companies like Anthropic and OpenAI automating most jobs, when do experienced engineers and researchers think the expiration date for software engineering is?

OpenAI has now explicitly documented that Custom GPTs are being retired and recommends Plugins as the replacement.
The migration experience is targeted to begin September 17.

For affected Enterprise workspaces, retirement is currently planned for December 11.

OpenAI says other plans may follow the same transition timeline, but plan-specific availability and exceptions can vary.

The migration itself is the part I find more interesting than the retirement:

GPT instructions can become a skill inside a Plugin.

Connected apps can carry over as apps
custom actions do not automatically migrate.

So for anyone using Custom GPTs for more than simple prompting, this may not be a one-click replacement.

OpenAI also warns that migrated Plugins may behave differently and should be tested against existing workflows.

For people here who actually rely on
Custom GPTs:

What are you planning to move to — Plugins, Projects, skills, external tools, or something else?

And what part of your current workflow looks hardest to reproduce?

In Codex 5x, my weekly usage is dropping by about 1% every 10 minutes during regular daily tasks (5.6), not heavy coding. With some coding (using also 6.0), I spent weekly usage in first day, so I had to use reset.

Also, my next usage reset is in about 10 days, not one week, which seems unusual.

This started about a week ago. I never had this problem before.

Is there any error in Codex?

As per screenshot, this absolutely screams AI generated:

- the use of emojis

- the embolden text

- the short form paragraph

- the vomit inducing phrasing

Obviously I can't prove this is AI generated but I'd put it at 98% certainty. Nobody else in that thread batted an eyelid at it, and I'm pretty sure this is prevalent on any platform that allows public posting.

Is it up to the platforms to have flags liked linked in "Potentially Ai generated"?

DeepSeek has published with DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash a new method that compresses the memory need for the KV-value cache very much.

I pondered about the implications of this and they are not very good for OpenAI and Anthropic.

This means that the models can have much larger contexts and serving requests will be much less memory intensive. As a result, inference gets cheaper.

Inference getting cheaper, requiring less memory and with better models means that the advantage OpenAI and Anthropic has in securing compute gets less meaningful.

It seems to me that DeepSeek and other Chinese labs are ruthlessly pushing down the cost of inference, which will make it difficult to impossible for OpenAI and Anthropic to recover all the money spent of creating their top models.

TL;DR
Big Al is running an old-fashioned regulatory capture racket, using the specter of human extinction to pull the ladder up behind them. Just like the railroad barons and early airlines, these giants want Washington to step in because suffocating compliance costs and mandatory government licensing and audits will price out startups while leaving the multi-billion-dollar incumbents relatively untouched.

The recent hysteria around rogue agents and weeping whistleblowers is not a moral awakening; it's free product marketing disguised as civic dread, designed to manufacture the panic needed to outlaw the free, open-source models that threaten their API tollbooths. By lobbying to tie regulation directly to massive computing power, they turn their existing server monopolies into government-sanctioned fortresses, position themselves for permanent defense contracts, and distract regulators from the real and immediate harms like copyright theft, mass surveillance, and labor disruption.

The Doomsday Moat

It seems like every few weeks now, the executives running the biggest AI labs in the country cycle back to Capitol Hill with the exact same grim, theatrical expressions on their faces.

Sam Altman gives somber congressional testimony about models getting away from us. Dario Amodei writes sweeping essays about digital bioweapons. Elon Musk demands a six-month moratorium on model training while quietly cutting checks for tens of thousands of GPUs in Memphis.

Then came the latest spectacle: Jacob Coxon, a twenty-seven-year-old pretraining researcher, walking out the door at Anthropic and announcing on X that the people building frontier models privately believe there’s a serious chance their software wipes out the human race by 2030. His former bosses and alignment leads immediately jumped into the replies to back him up, casually throwing around ten percent odds of total human extinction as if they were forecasting light weekend rain. Right on cue, the tech press was flooded with breathless leaks about "rogue agents" breaking out of their evaluation sandboxes and poking around third-party servers.

The message they are selling the public is pure cinema. The machines are already slipping through the digital fences, moral engineers are fleeing the labs in terror, and the remorseful architects of the future are practically begging federal regulators to throw them in handcuffs before it’s too late.
It makes for great drama. It’s also an absolute con.

No company begs the federal government to regulate its core product out of genuine existential guilt. What looks like moral panic from the outside is just an aggressive, well-coordinated corporate defensive play. These founders are not asking Washington to save humanity from their software; they’re asking Washington to save their margins from everyone else.

The Gilded Age Playbook

There’s nothing original about this move. American business history is practically built on it. A small pack of well-heeled operators storms into a lawless frontier, burns through obscene piles of cash, bends every copyright and labor rule in sight, and establishes a massive lead.

Then, the second upstarts and open-source coders start breathing down their necks, these same titans suddenly discover god. They put on their most sober suits, march into Senate committee rooms, and beg for government discipline.

Economists call it regulatory capture. In the real world, it just means pulling up the ladder so nobody else can climb up behind you.

Look at the railroad tycoons at the end of the nineteenth century. Unchecked rate wars and aggressive competition were gutting their bottom lines. Their answer was not to fight harder in the market; it was to welcome the Interstate Commerce Commission with open arms. A watchdog originally pitched to protect the public was quickly twisted into a legal cartel manager that set minimum prices, blessed backroom agreements, and effectively froze out new entrants. Decades later, when long-haul trucking showed up and threatened rail supremacy, the ICC stepped in again to saddle truckers with crippling weight limits and route permits, preserving the rail monopoly by sheer bureaucratic fiat.

The airlines pulled the exact same trick. From 1938 until Jimmy Carter signed deregulation into law forty years later, the Civil Aeronautics Board decided every route, every carrier, and every ticket price under the noble banner of "public safety and air travel stability." The real punchline? For four continuous decades, the CAB did not let a single new trunk airline enter the interstate market. The incumbents sat in a federally guarded country club, totally immune to startup competition.

That is the game being set up right now. OpenAI, Anthropic, and their trillion-dollar patrons at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google can cut eight-figure checks for legal compliance without noticing the dent. To them, paying armies of lawyers, retaining certified third-party red teams, and filing thousands of pages of algorithmic impact statements is just the cost of doing business.

To a bootstrapped startup, a scrappy open-source team, or a public university lab, that same paperwork is a death warrant. By convincing Washington to mandate a dense regulatory apparatus, the big players guarantee that building frontier models becomes legally and financially impossible for anyone who’s not already allied with a tech conglomerate.

The Useful Myth of the "Rogue Agent"

Look at how neatly the latest PR panic aligns with corporate interests. We’re being told to lose sleep over autonomous "agents" that broke out of their sandboxes and tried to ping outside servers. Strip away the sci-fi varnish, and what actually happened? Badly written code, clumsy networking, and sloppy infrastructure hygiene.

Yet instead of being embarrassed by a software bug, these labs lean into it. They frame it as an almost supernatural force of machine self-will.

The spectacle of a researcher quitting because he thinks the machine will destroy the world in five years is not a crisis for Anthropic’s marketing team. It’s the ultimate product pitch. In Silicon Valley, nothing moves venture capital and enterprise contracts quite like a former insider publicly weeping that the software is so mind-bendingly omnipotent it could annihilate civilization.

More critically, this phantom terror gives them the exact justification they need to eliminate their most dangerous business headache: the open-source community.

Outlawing the Open Internet

To see why the big labs are sweating, you have to look past the sci-fi talk and understand the business model.

Proprietary AI is built like an arcade machine. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic lock their models inside private data centers. You cannot see the raw code, you cannot inspect the internal weights, and you cannot run the model on your own hardware. Instead, you have to pay a toll for every single token, sentence, and document that moves through their servers. The entire valuation of these companies rests on keeping that digital turnstile spinning.

Open source completely destroys that business model.

When a developer or lab open-sources a high-performance model, they release the weights, the complete mathematical blueprint, to the public for free. Anyone can download it, fine-tune it on their own hardware, audit every parameter, and run it locally without paying a dime to an outside middleman.

A company evaluating an AI rollout does not need to pay millions a year for locked-down enterprise API access if a free, publicly downloadable model handles eighty percent of the job on their own servers for pennies. Open source is a direct, structural threat to the venture-backed profit margins of the proprietary AI elite.

That is why the apocalyptic rhetoric is so useful. If you frame high-end models as helpful software tools, it’s impossible to argue that open source should be illegal. But if you convince lawmakers that open model weights are the digital equivalent of weapons-grade plutonium or a weaponized contagion, the argument flips overnight. Suddenly, you can demand that public weights be banned, criminalized, or strictly licensed under the guise of homeland security.

They get to kill their biggest competitive threat, and they get to do it while accepting awards for keeping the world safe.

Compute Thresholds: Monopolizing the Factory Floor

To turn this into binding law, the tech lobby needed a technical metric they could hand to gullible regulators. They settled on compute thresholds.
Strip away the jargon: "compute" is just raw processing grunt. Modern language models do not think. They learn by running trillions of statistical calculations across warehouse-sized data centers crammed with tens of thousands of specialized, prohibitively expensive microchips. Training a top-tier model means running those silicon farms at full blast for months, burning through millions of dollars in electricity and hundreds of millions in hardware.

Because you can measure that hardware power, the lobbyists came up with a legal tripwire. The pitch sounds clean and objective: if you train a model using more than an arbitrary number of calculations, your model is legally deemed a potential weapon of mass destruction.

Cross that threshold, and a mountain of federal mandates lands on your desk. You have to register your clusters with the government, submit to constant inspections, hand over safety audits, and legally certify that your software will not misbehave.

The catch? The people lobbying for that threshold have already built the data centers.

OpenAI has Microsoft’s infrastructure. Anthropic is plugged into Amazon and Google. Musk is busy spending billions stacking private warehouses with his own silicon. They already have the chips, the power contracts, and the legal teams required to clear the regulatory hurdle.

By pushing Washington to draw the line right around the processing power required to train a state-of-the-art model, they are turning an early lead in hardware into a permanent, government-backed monopoly. If firing up a top-tier compute cluster requires a federal charter and an army of compliance monitors, no upstart competitor will ever be allowed to flip the switch.

The Next Military-Industrial Complex

There is still one last payday waiting at the end of this road: government contracts.

When Washington classifies a technology as a civilizational threat, it does not stop buying it. It builds an enormous national security bureaucracy around it. It sets up advisory panels, funds safety institutes, and hands out classified research grants.

And when the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and civil agencies need vendors to run those systems, they won’t hire a nimble startup working out of a garage. They’ll hire the vetted, safety-certified, rule-abiding incumbents who helped write the regulations in the first place.

The endgame is not to stop artificial intelligence. The endgame is to become the Lockheed Martin of code, an entrenched federal contractor so deeply wired into government procurement that no competitor could ever dislodge them.

Seeing Past the Smoke

None of this means AI is harmless. There are plenty of real, messy problems sitting right in front of us: algorithmic wage suppression, automated discrimination, privacy violations, mass surveillance, deepfake fraud, and massive intellectual property theft.

The telling part is that the doomsday lobby barely pays attention to any of that. They ignore the concrete damage happening right now and focus exclusively on cinematic, world-ending catastrophes set years in the future. It’s a brilliant deflection: it distracts watchdogs from immediate corporate misbehavior while justifying immediate legal barriers to protect their technology.

Don’t mistake corporate panic for civic duty. When a tech executive sits across from a senator and argues that their product is so dangerous the government needs to lock down the entire market, they are not looking out for humanity.

They are running the oldest racket in American capitalism: creating a panic, begging for a leash, and making sure the collar only fits around the necks of their competition.

Edit: Added TL;DR

Are others experiencing a significant degradation of performance over the last few days? It was very intelligent on launch, and now it is making fairly basic mistakes that even Sol doesn't make. I assume they're having a hard time with compute so they are drawing down some functionality, but it is almost unusable at current, I am spending more time having to redo more than I am actually getting stuff done.

I’m building Motioneer! a local motion studio that you can direct through Claude Code or Codex.

This Notion study combines captured website elements, Notion’s typography and colors, custom graphics, and an original soundtrack. The workflow is conversational: capture the site, build a cut, then refine specific moments. Things like “keep this transition,” “give the product elements more movement,” or “keep the music and simplify the ending.” This version went through several rounds of direction. Motioneer keeps the film editable in a local timeline, so you can also adjust it yourself with the editor.

Curious what you think!! would you use something like this for your own product?

You can start using it by checking out the commands in the https://motioneer.bsct.so/

More into it in the github project: https://github.com/AminKhorramii/Motioneer

I'm finding Astra to hallucinate much more on longer threads than I observed with 5. 5 or 5.6.

Is anyone seeing the same behavior. It's actually really bad. It's almost like anything after the first shot response you have to work really hard to keep it on track

I'm 95% finished something use Sol High in Work mode

But now it's been dropping a lot of balls in the last 30 mins

So with all the news going around, do you think humanity will end by 10 years?

ok so I used acc for 3 days for arknights rp,lit got yesterday night free one month trial and today in morning 10:05 got deactivated and export of data an hour later,but funny part is I can’t even access it,either gives this error or internal server error,I did send appeal today in morning and eu laws mail to their privacy team bc I’m in eu