OpenAI's Jakub Pachocki says Astra has already cleared the company's "automated AI research intern" bar, and Altman targets an internal AGI declaration by December

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Pachocki says Astra can take an experimental idea, implement it in OpenAI's codebase, run the experiment and report results, and can follow up on a paper in work that used to take a human researcher about a week, which meets the internal research-intern threshold he had targeted for September 2026. Altman told TIME the company is "not quite yet" at AGI but will declare it internally by year end, and Mark Chen puts the company at 80% of the way there. swyx's read is the useful one: the bar is defined by OpenAI, unaccountable, and worth tracking as a compute-allocation signal rather than a capability claim.