AGI

Google-affiliated researchers Benjamin Bratton, Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika propose "Artificial Symbiotic Intelligence," a framework in which AGI emerges from a social system of people and AI agents rather than a single self-improving machine. The essay, written for the Deepmind Institute, is a conceptual argument and reports no benchmark results.

Google DeepMind's new head Koray Kavukcuoglu says Gemini 4 is in early post-training and could ship well before year-end, following the quiet cancellation of Gemini 3.5 Pro. He downplayed the AGI question that defined predecessor Demis Hassabis's tenure, calling it 'not the right conversation.'

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra took first place on ulam.ai's ErdosBench, solving 106 of 226 open math problems and disproving 27 others. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says the company deliberately didn't optimize for math research, prioritizing recursive self-improvement work instead.

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, calling it its most capable and most aligned model yet. The model uses a reasoning technique called 'opaque recurrence' that critics say reduces visibility into its chain of thought.