GPT-6 Astra Is Here. Gen Z Is Going Analog

O ver the weekend, OpenAI released its latest model: GPT-6 Astra, “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model.” In an interview with CNBC, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that “Astra was a ‘new capability level’ and has changed his workflows. He said he expects ‘a boom of entrepreneurship, of creativity, of economic growth, of scientific discovery.’”

Statistically, Altman is likely to be proven correct. In 2025, AI-related natural-science publications increased 26 percent, with AI now accounting for anywhere between 5.8 percent and 8.8 percent of research output. Similarly, a 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 750 executives found positive productivity effects from AI, especially in high-skill services and finance; another survey of nearly 6,000 executives across four countries found that 69 percent of firms were using AI. At least initially, it seems that AI is bringing efficiency to its users.

First examples of the model’s use show professional-level Blender animations and a six-month increase in productivity for internal OpenAI projects and have sparked debates over whether this is the first step in the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Astra has also completed 48 levels of an unofficial CAPTCHA test, pointing to a possible upcoming horizon where the statement “I Am Not a Robot” is harder and harder to prove. Somewhere in the ether, Alan Turing is shuddering.

Despite promising trends, the promotional video for the update depicts a scene that would not look out of place among the parlor walls of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

While Altman has claimed that “no one intellectually honest can look at what’s happening and not feel the weight of responsibility in front of us,” initial critiques of Astra have compared the model to WALL-E. An X user commented: “Give humans nothing to do, nothing to build, nothing to struggle for long enough, and Idiocracy stops looking like satire and starts looking like a roadmap.”

To be fair, placing concerns over safety and OpenAI’s filing for an initial public stock offering aside, Astra may well produce precisely the abundance Altman predicts. But the peculiar reaction to its release suggests that efficiency and ease may no longer be enough to persuade everyone that the future that AI promises is desirable.

Entrepreneurship, creativity, economic growth, and scientific discovery . . . and yet young people are buying film cameras and dumbphones. Grandma hobbies are making a comeback. Hosting is an art again. Personalized and unique content is the new currency when generative AI is leading us to grow more homogenized. Whether you like him or not, the performative matcha guy with a Catcher in the Rye paperback in his Carhartt back pocket and knitting needles sticking conveniently out of his New Yorker tote bag may be on to something. Efficiency is out, going analog is kinda chic.

Young people are hardly throwing their iPhones into the nearest body of water. In fact, 61 percent of Americans under 30 are among ChatGPT’s top users, even as they have become increasingly anxious about its effects. But maybe that’s not such a contradiction. Gen Z does not have to reject artificial intelligence to reject its underlying proposition that friction is necessarily a problem to be solved. If information, entertainment, images, and increasingly competent prose can be produced instantaneously and endlessly, then scarcity and effort can become attractive.

Altman may therefore get his boom. AI may help us start more companies, make more things, and discover more about the world. But abundance cannot tell us what is worth making, and efficiency cannot tell us which efforts are worth preserving. Sometimes the scenic route is preferable to the highway.

Astra may be getting better at answering “I am not a robot,” but perhaps making Grandma’s quilts ourselves and silly Partiful invites are small but important ways of remembering why we’re not.