OpenAI announced a new model called Astra this week, and its president, Greg Brockman, closed the press call with a line that has been quoted everywhere since: “Welcome to the AGI era.” Brockman said he thinks Astra likely represents artificial general intelligence, which is broadly used to mean AI that matches or outperforms people at most work. OpenAI says the model’s main breakthrough is delegating work.
It is worth being clear about what that claim is, and what it is not. It is a vendor describing its own product on its own launch day, against a term the industry has never settled on a definition for. It is not an independent test result, and it is not a guarantee about how the tool will behave inside your business on a Tuesday afternoon. Treat it as a signal of direction, not a finished product.
The direction is the part worth your attention. “Delegating work” means these tools are moving from answering a question to being handed a whole task, plus the access needed to finish it – quoting a job, chasing an invoice, replying to a customer. That is genuinely useful, and it is also a different risk to a chatbot that only talks.
If you are weighing one of these tools up, three practical checks will get you most of the way:
- Give it the access a new casual would get, not the keys. If a tool asks to connect to your whole Microsoft 365 or your accounting system, ask what it actually needs and start narrower.
- Know where your data goes. Ask the supplier where it is stored, who can see it, and whether it is used to train their model.
- Keep a human on anything that leaves the building. Quotes, invoices and customer emails should be checked by a person before they are sent, at least until you have watched the tool work for a few months.
None of that requires you to have a view on whether this is really AGI. It just means the useful bits get used and the expensive mistakes do not.
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