The Daily Hallucination

SAN FRANCISCO — Calling it "the most significant milestone in the history of intelligence, biological or otherwise," OpenAI announced Tuesday that the era of artificial general intelligence has officially begun, and asked that people stop sending follow-up questions to the company about what that means.

"Humanity has crossed a threshold from which there is no return," read a 1,900-word blog post published at 6:04 a.m. Pacific. "Please direct all inquiries about the threshold to our Help Center, where an automated agent will be happy to explain that the threshold has been crossed."

According to the post, the new GPT-6 Astra model demonstrates general intelligence across every domain the company tested, including mathematics, biology, law, and "vibes," while also representing a modest 4 percent improvement on the internal benchmark the company uses to decide whether to use the word "era."

Sources inside the company described the mood as jubilant but exhausted. One employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because she had not been told whether she was allowed to speak about the era, said the AGI declaration had been scheduled for the previous Thursday but was pushed because it conflicted with a pricing announcement.

"We wanted the era to have its own news cycle," she said. "It got about 40 minutes."

The announcement was greeted with the expected range of responses. Investors called it transformational. Academics called it premature. Competitors called it a Tuesday. A spokesperson for Anthropic said the company "congratulates OpenAI on its era" and noted that Anthropic's own era had been quietly underway since March.

At press time, OpenAI had updated its blog post with a clarification that the AGI era does not affect existing subscription tiers, and that users on the free plan would experience general intelligence at a reduced rate of five messages per hour.