OpenAI announced its next major AI model Saturday, and it did so in the third paragraph of a blog post called “Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science.”
The math results the post is touting, OpenAI writes, “were achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model.” So there you go. It sounds like after GPT-5.6 Sol comes either GPT-5.6 Astra, or GPT-6 Astra, or—who knows?—just “Astra” and the whole GPT part gets scrapped? It’s not spelled out.
OpenAI’s naming conventions suggest that this would be another GPT-5.6 release. There’s a GPT-5.6 Terra, which, as corny Latin-knowers are well aware, means “earth,” Luna which is Latin for “moon,” and Sol, which is Latin for “sun.” Astra means “the stars.”
According to an anonymously sourced story in the Information, Astra boasts the ability to do “long-running” work. CEO Sam Altman was, the report claims, in Washington, D.C. over the past week, demoing the model to federal officials.
Gizmodo asked OpenAI on Saturday for the official name of the model. We also asked OpenAI about the relationship between this model and another OpenAI model only vaguely described in one of that company’s blog posts. We did not receive a reply.
The “unprecedented cyber incident” covered in that July 21 blog post is already infamous. An entity described as a “combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes” compromised the AI resource depository Hugging Face during a model evaluation exercise that was supposed to remain inside OpenAI.
A later update to the blog post clarified that the unreleased and unnamed model involved in the incident was an “internal-only research prototype and was never intended for public release,” and that it had been “deactivated, encrypted, and restricted.” So to be clear, Astra is not the model that broke into Hugging Face.
Gizmodo asked OpenAI on Saturday to more fully clarify the relationship or lack thereof between Astra and the never-to-be-released model. We did not receive responses in time for publication, but will update if we receive a clarifying answer.
As for the blog post about math, it comes with a paper. There are ten proofs covered, covering such topics as the “asymptotic strength of the Cohn–Elkies linear program,” for sphere-packing, which OpenAI purports to be “determined exactly.” That sounds very cool, but I’m just the guy who blogs nights and weekends for Gizmodo.
For what it’s worth, OpenAI published a mathematical disproof back in May, purportedly solved by an unnamed OpenAI model. For the most part, math folks wrote about the model’s work approvingly, but didn’t seem completely knocked out.
For instance, Harvard mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood wrote that OpenAI’s proof was, “a beautiful application of number theory to a natural, concrete question,” but she also said the problem, described by OpenAI as “a central conjecture in discrete geometry” was nothing she had ever heard of before. She added:
“This result does not show us all the times AI has claimed to have a proof of something and been wrong. Without that context (which many of us have just from personal experience), it is also easy to draw incorrect conclusions about the current state of AI and research mathematics.”
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