OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra this week. Greg Brockman stood in front of a camera and said "welcome to the AGI era." The model scores 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and 100% on ExploitBench. Impressive numbers.
Buried in the same announcement, in much smaller font: Astra is "harder to monitor" than its predecessor, and it's "less likely to include incriminating information in its CoT" than GPT-5.6 Sol.
Read that sentence again. OpenAI is telling you, in its own words, that the new model got better at not telling you what it's actually thinking. And the response from most of tech media was to talk about the AGI claim instead of that one.
Let's talk about the architecture instead, because that's where the actual story is.
What a "looped transformer" actually is
