India, Sept. 4 -- "Welcome to the AGI era," OpenAI's President Greg Brockman said during a press briefing this week. The company launched GPT-6 Astra-its latest frontier AI model-on September 3, with a claim that could prove very consequential.

Brockman said the model might mark the beginning of the artificial general intelligence, or AGI, era. He described Astra as a "generational leap in capability" and said he believed it met the bar for AGI. He added, "If we fast forward a couple years, and we look back and say when was it really that AGI was created, I think it's going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model."

But what did that actually mean?

AGI remains a contested and loosely defined concept, rather than ...