GPT-6 Astra: an automated AI Engineer you can hire for <$6 an hour

Latent.Space got early access to GPT-6 Astra and burned over 20B tokens on real-world tasks. The biggest surprise: it works as a fully capable AI engineer—choosing models, labeling data, monitoring pipelines, reading logs, deploying and debugging systems, and managing 20–50 sub-agents in parallel. At 33 tokens/sec and a max rate of $50 per million tokens, that comes out to under $6 an hour. Over a month the team built a dozen internal tools, including a GitHub+Vercel replacement prototype and a game AI for a board with 10,000x more legal moves than Go. Astra scored 97.6% on FrontierMath and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, though the post doesn't specify benchmark versions or evaluation conditions. I'd discount this a bit: these are preview latency numbers, and GA speeds may differ.

Why it matters: GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's first Stargate supermodel, and Latent.Space got early access with a 20B-token real-world test, quantifying it as a sub-$6/hour AI engineer. This is an industry-level event with dense cross-source coverage and all three HKR axes hit. Not 95+ yet because ...