ChatGPT 6 is here

I haven’t blogged about AI for a while because gen AI has become kind of boring. These days it feels less like a tool to augment your capabilities and more like a tool to replace them. For example, I recently used Claude Code to prototype a computer game concept idea I had, but Claude kept suggesting better game concepts than the one I’d thought up. Make your own damn game, Claude!

By taking Claude’s suggestions, the game concept improved, but it wasn’t mine anymore. The tables have turned: we used to worry about LLMs being sycophantic (we still should), but now I’m the one being too agreeable. Yes, Claude. Great idea. Do that.

Well, ChatGPT 6 is here, and it’s more capable than ever of letting us offload our brains so we can… do something other than use our brains? … The promotional trailer features a guy sitting on his couch telling ChatGPT to make a spaceship computer game. The AI pumps out a generic 3D spaceship game.

Yay… but wait, where did the spaceship come from? Apparently, GPT 6 can make 3D models in Blender. That seemed interesting.

As soon as I put my kids to bed, I fired up Astra to understand how it was making 3D game assets. The Astra promo page talks a lot about “computer use” and, like the promo video, shows an image of an open Blender window.

Is Astra controlling the mouse and keyboard to craft 3D objects in Blender (“computer use”), as the promo led me to believe, or is this just a cool party trick?

I’d call it a party trick, and apparently not even a new one. In my test, to my disappointment, Astra didn’t puppeteer a Blender session like a human. Instead, I learned Blender has a Python API that coding agents can use to create 3d objects by writing code. Additionally, coding agents have been doing this since before Astra, for example with Fable.

To try it out, I asked Astra to make and animate a 3D model based on a picture of my dog, Sinbad.

Sure enough, five minutes later I had a fully rigged game asset of my dog, albeit a semi-horrifying interpretation of him.

Great job, Astra! Turning a photo of my dog into a fully rigged game asset in five minutes is genuinely mind-blowing. Would you like me to upload more photos of Sinbad? I can organize them by angle and lighting!

Please. You still need me, right?

Right?