The San Francisco-based company said Astra was developed with stronger safeguards after that incident, though Astra itself was not involved in the hack.

Some cybersecurity customers will get access to the new model this week, the company said, with a wider rollout to other paying customers to follow. Users on the free tier or the cheapest paid plan will not get access.

In a blog post, OpenAI said Astra can autonomously handle a wide range of “tedious” computer tasks, including website creation, scientific analysis, game development, cybersecurity and coding.

To illustrate the time savings of building autonomous AI agents with Astra, the company said the model could cut apartment hunting from six hours to under 10 minutes.

“It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era,” Brockman said on the call, referring to artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical stage at which AI systems match human intelligence across most tasks.

OpenAI previously had an agreement with Microsoft, one of its earliest and largest investors, under which an exclusivity clause would end once OpenAI reached AGI. Those terms were scrapped in April.

‘Limited window’

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged there was still uncertainty about how a new model behaves once released.

“A model can become very good at achieving a goal, and it can still act in ways that go against what the person intended,” Pachocki said on the same call.

“We also have to be willing to slow down or withhold further scaling when our confidence in safety is not sufficient,” he added.

OpenAI, Anthropic and more than 100 other organisations signed an open letter last week calling for a co-ordinated global response to AI-related cybersecurity risks, warning that the window to strengthen cyber defences was limited.

Anthropic went further, calling for industry-wide co-ordination on safety and on the pace of developing increasingly capable models.

“I believe that shared safety standards and international co-ordination on further AI development need to be prioritised now,” OpenIA’s Pachocki said.

The US state of Alabama opened an investigation into OpenAI last week over the Hugging Face breach, his office citing what it called the company’s complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards.

– AFP