Summary
Matthew Berman shares an early-access deep dive into GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI’s latest model released September 3, 2026, presenting an unusually wide range of original demonstrations built before public access. Highlights include a fully playable Fall Guys clone generated from a single prompt, a generative ASCII-character 3D city that populates infinitely as you walk through it, and a SimCity-style game that Berman ran for five straight days using a slash-goal loop — producing a working city with traffic, emergencies, population happiness, and zone controls, all rendered in HTML and JavaScript without perceptible frame drops.
Berman places particular emphasis on Astra’s browser control and computer use capabilities, showing the model writing its own screen-recording software from scratch, operating a browser in real time with a visible countdown timer, and completing a multi-step research workflow in Excalidraw. He describes computer use as the feature he finds most practically valuable for delegating tasks he would otherwise do manually — DMV appointments, eBay listings, and similar friction-heavy work.
The video also presents sponsored benchmark data from Box AI’s complex work evaluation for GPT-6 Astra, showing full-dataset improvement of 3% overall with much larger gains in specific verticals: technology jumped from 62% to 77%, energy from 77% to 86%, and legal from 64% to 72%. Berman closes with a measured critique noting Astra’s tendency to default to forest-green palettes and flat design across unprompted creative tasks, while confirming the model is highly steerable with minimal guidance.
📺 Source: Matthew Berman · Published September 04, 2026
🏷️ Format: Review
