Voices
Simon Willison reads OpenAI's spend chart and pins the late-July jump to internal GPT-6 Astra access
Reacting on September 6, Willison says he is "intrigued at what caused that significant acceleration in AI spend per researcher in late July" and concludes the most likely explanation is "that's when internal employees gained access to the model later released as GPT-6 Astra." He reads the chart, which climbs from near zero in February to roughly $600/day by late August, as evidence that "2026 has been the year that agentic engineering really took off at OpenAI." It is a useful inference for builders: the spend curve is a proxy for when a model crosses from demo to daily driver.
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