GPT-6 Astra Designed a Gadget Entirely on Its Own

OpenAI, the makers of GPT and Codex, announced their newest AI model, GPT-6 Astra. Using it, two engineers designed a device, one that talks to their code-generation tool Codex, with no human input at all. That includes the physical enclosure, the circuit board layout, and the firmware. The whole process took them about a week of spare time. They even found a contract manufacturer who delivered the first prototypes in under a month. Before production, though, they had to revise the design several times, because Astra did not quite account for the factory's real-world constraints and tolerances.

Here is the more interesting part. On their own benchmark, BenchCAD 2.0, which measures how well an AI model can design hardware, their next model, not yet released, scores 0.875. Astra, at its highest reasoning setting, scores only 0.594. In effect, OpenAI is saying its current best models are still worse at hardware design than the upcoming one. And even that upcoming model needed human help to handle the messy details of reality.