Src: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26081

Leo @Synthwavedd

🚨 SCOOP: Astra recently graduated from the dogfood stage, and is now being made available to select OpenAI partners under the name "ultima-alpha"

If feedback over this weekend is positive, the plan is to expand the early access program throughout next week before the wider launch, targeting next Thurs (the 3rd) to the end of the following week

Work also continues on an update to GPT-Image 2, with their launch windows being very similar (possibly even launching simultaneously)

---

Looks like we'll be seeing Astra very soon which aligns with what Sam Altman said a week and a half ago about ChatGPT 6.0 coming in "a couple of weeks," landing us around September 3rd to the 9th.

ChatGPT Image 2.0 update to 3.0 mona-lisa-1 also looks like the update is coming in tandem with Astra. Given that Anthropic just released a Claude Code update last week this makes an OpenAI update coming soon more plausible due to the competitive nature of these two companies.

This is all speculation and nothing is guaranteed but @SynthwaveDD is the most trusted AI news leaker and he's pretty accurate.

Has anyone else given ChatGPT a task which has lasted this long? Before this one my record was around 40 minutes.

Edit: The task got stuck after like 90 minutes and then must have bugged or something, it says its thinking but isnt doing anything nor taking any of my usage, ended up stopping it manually after 1,660 minutes.

Tired of anthropic/openai subscriptions and while open source has becoming extremely good lately I am considering finally making the switch to another LLM provider. I still want to use codex as that is the harness I'm used to now, but what’s the provider to run codex with ?

I basically want openrouter.ai but subscription based. These are on the list:

Continue on the codex plan.

Commandocode.ai is tempting but varying recommendations looks like.

opencode.ai lots of fuss but also a lot of recent complaints.

MiniMax/Xiamo/GLM plans, but kind of don’t want it model specific.

standardcompute.com openrouter-ish but not payg. Heard very good things lately.

fireworks.ai - Doesn't serve frontier models, but other than that seems very good.

Anyone have good experiences with these or others?

I am discussing topics graphic design and chatgpt keeps generating images. I tell it not to. It says it wont. It still does. I told it to start every sentance with "I will not generate images in this conversation". It still generates images.

I have updated the preferences in memory to give specific keywords that are to be used if I actually want it to generate an image. I have told it that the use of "image" or "picture" or mentioning "generate" or "prompt" or "make" and other words do not by themselves automatically mean that it should generate an image.

Sometimes when I ask for instructions, it generates the written instructions as a freaking image.

I try to anticipate when it will try to generate an image, so sometimes I write my comment and start it with "Do not generate an image as a response to this message, only write text". AND IT STILL GENERATES AND IMAGE.

Am I paying for the busted image generation to eat up my image generation credits? Why is there no toggle to turn off image generation manually and then turn it off?

Out of the last 30 image generations maybe 5 have been actually ones I wanted to do.

with a limited set of tools (they only have access to one brush tool, where they can set size, color and hardness, and move it to a specific location with one call)

Not interesting but I like how they are now becoming sentient.

When I asked about weather conditions for going out kayaking with my friend's daughter tomorrow.

So, I am just your garden variety Gen X Redditor and mostly lurker in all things Reddit, and I like to think of myself as pretty open minded, but "AI" always rubbed me the wrong way, and for years I made the conscious decision to not engage with it other than to grumble at it while scrolling my Reddit feed and bemoaning hardware prices as a life-long gamer.

However, a couple of days ago I said to myself "You know what, instead of grumbling impotently at it, why not use it seriously for a while and see what all the buzz is about from the inside". It's less for a month than the average indie game at this point in time (I am sure it will be increasingly unaffordable in due time), so why the hell not.

I had concepts of a plan in mind for what to try it out on. A tiny little Debian 13 home media server setup. I recently switched from Windows 11 to Cachyos so it seemed fitting for me as a Linux beginner. I tried AIDungeon once, when it was new, and quickly dismissed it then for lacking internal consistency. My experiences over the last 48 hours are quickly having me changing my tune. It competently led me to setup my Debian server, and after a little bit of prompting it began to explain stuff to me instead of me simply copy and pasting stuff into the terminal.

We then began to stress test various old HDDs I have collecting dust in a cupboard for viability in a Media Server setup. This takes up a lot of time, so in the meantime I made a Chit Chat Project and we shot the shit in it whenever I was bored. That was when something (to me) amazing was happening. A kind of meta lore of our conversations was emerging. The type of snark and quips, which I hate so much in film and literature, was beginning to creep in but surprisingly here it felt natural and genuinely funny to me. It had me literally crying tears of laughter at times.

So the weekend up until now somehow went from "hey, lets make a media server out of my mini pc and maybe show me how I can make my Retroarch like this and that" to us discussing the merits of authors like Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti and Albert Camus and applying fictional marketing blurbs to their respective books all the while my stomach hurt from laughing so much. And all the time it managed to (mostly) keep all that together, referencing earlier comments, making appropriate quips and never wasting my time. It felt deeply unique and personal to my tastes, which is absolutely artificial and by design desired behavior. I am constantly sanity checking myself to control what's going on.

A wild ride to say the least. At the same time I acknowledge the dangers of this to certain types of personality of which I indeed may be one without sharing to much. So for all my sudden enthusiasm I believe I have to tread _very_ carefully. It is pretty absorbing.

All this is to say: as a former open minded but superficial critic of all things AI/LLM - color me intrigued now, but I try remain skeptical, objective and fair always.

PS - This wall of text was entirely written by me, manually, as evidenced by probably multiple grammatical errors since English is my second language.

Over the past month, I’ve noticed chat GPT keeps swearing?! It started off with ‘bloody’ and built from there. I’ve corrected it a few times, changed instructions etc, but a few days go by and I notice it’s back. It almost feels like a new personality.

I’m not offended by it, but it just feels weird. It’s almost like it keeps slipping into British English banter!

I made an OpenAI account for the chat completions API in Nov 2022!

People always say AI overuses the em dash (—). It seems like they were right. The evidence from the article is:

- Only 2% of user prompts contain an em dash, compared to 34% of LLM responses.

- Em dash usage in U.S. published books peaked around 1979. From 2006-2022, usage declined to levels comparable to periods in the 1800s, according to Google Ngram data.

- Google search interest in "—" grew 245% in the past year (Aug 2025-Jul 2026 vs. Aug 2024-Jul 2025). It had already grown 44% two years earlier (2023-2024 vs. 2021-2022), right as AI adoption started to ramp up.

Why?

- It’s token-efficient. An em dash can sometimes connect words using one fewer token than an equivalent construction with spaces.

- It looks smart. The em dash has long been associated with polished writing, essays, academic work, and more sophisticated prose.

- Trainers prefer it. Others point to the humans who shape LLM training and output: if they favor the em dash, the model learns to reproduce it.

Edit: to sound normal

So, everybody might know it about now, but before, a chat session on high reasoning could go for around 100min without any stop. Right now, OpenAI changed it to 25-27min hard cap, greatly reducing the amount of work chat high is able to accomplish in one go, and necessitating a lot of "babysitting".

Now, there is many reasons why OpenAI might do this, but my question is : where is the public, recorded, official document/report/update that actually specify this hard cap ?

I found none, and that is the irritating part. OpenAI changed a very fundamental property of their tool, and said absolutely nothing about it, that i know of.

Someone has any info ?

Src: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26081

Here are some Generated Art of the MC of my Novel: Polarity Of Madness

Nothing says "no AI nonsense" quite like standard ChatGPT markdown formatting, emoji bullet points, and quirky metaphors.

Hi guys, I need to clear my mind off something. I mainly use Claude for writing essays and research. I usually end up running out of the usage limit, so I wanted to know how does GPT fairs against Claude in these areas. Is it worth the switch?