Our AI Future is Splitting

GPT-6 Astra was released yesterday and from an AI Strategy perspective, the world is about to split in half.

Two weeks ago Sam Altman said the AI timelines were wrong. "We've all been too ambitious on timelines," he said, and the reason he gave was that the economy has too much inertia. People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. He called it a positive, and said he was grateful for it.

That's a real turn, and he isn't the only one who made it. Anthropic's Dario Amodei spent 2025 warning that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white collar jobs within five years and push unemployment to 10 or 20 percent. By May of this year he was onstage with Jamie Dimon reaching for the Jevons Paradox instead, the idea that efficiency creates more demand rather than less. Both of the men running the two biggest labs walked their own timelines back.

And then yesterday OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman closed the press briefing by saying "Welcome to the AGI era." He said he personally believes OpenAI has reached AGI, and left it to the rest of us to decide whether Astra meets the definition.

For my money, he's right. Astra is the next level and it feels like it can do it all. The AGI era has arrived.

I'm thinking about AI strategy all the time, and it makes sense. If I'm going to put work into something, I actually want to think about where it's going to go, how people are going to adopt it, and what's going to be happening next. The problem with AI strategy right now is that Altman is right that society just works a certain way, some of it even hates AI, and adoption is going to be slower than many people realize. But yet, super intelligence is now happening.

We have to step back to think about what is happening here. I'm a Producer working in creative arts. I grew up reading about sci-fi all the time, thinking of how the future could go, and of course AI was a major part of many of those stories. For the good and the bad. With the AI era in full swing, I now think about how AI is going to impact the world all the time.

For companies, brands, creatives, individuals and strategists, the path forward is now going to be a world of intense tension. Society and humanity just work a certain way, and while you are going to try and force adoption, people work in systems and they work with the systems they understand. If they work in a new system and it doesn't work for them, it could ruin their work, their reputation and even their company. Better safe than sorry. At a mass society level, this is the case for what I'm seeing in companies where AI isn't native.

Yet the future is now here. If you played the game Civilization, getting AGI would feel like a win condition for your civilization. It's that big of a deal, and we now have AI answering impossible math questions, setting new marks across biology, chemistry, medicine and physics, creating impressive media and technology in one shot, and doing what you and I do better than we can do it. Astra helped improve a mathematical result on the gaps between prime numbers. That is not a demo.

It will be very frustrating for many AI companies to build society-changing technology and then watch it struggle to get adopted to the degree they think it should be.

It's not just that people don't like change. Huge sections of society want to tear AI down. They see the negatives of it. They are right about many of those negatives. They are our fellow citizens, human beings, and of course customers.

And this week gave them fresh ammunition. Astra is the first model OpenAI has designated as reaching the "critical" cybersecurity threshold under its own preparedness framework, meaning it can potentially find and exploit unknown vulnerabilities across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance. OpenAI also acknowledged that Astra was harder to monitor in evaluations designed to test whether it could evade oversight, and its own chief scientist called that decline in monitorability serious. When the company shipping the model says that out loud, the people who are worried are not being irrational.

The problem AI forward companies will run into is that society is splitting, with some seeing the potential and racing to adopt while running into real and natural adoption blockers in other parts of society. Even further, those anti-AI forces might find real power and be able to exert that power. AI can create opportunities and it can cause people to lose opportunities. These are very real things to consider.

What every company must seriously do is take real strategic time over these next 3 months to think about where they stand with AI in the short term and the long term. AI rewards teams that really take a beat to spec something out when it comes to technology creation, and AI also rewards those who use it to deeply spend time gathering information, planning, ideating and brainstorming. Why? Because AI is becoming excellent at execution, and a very clear and thoughtful plan will help your company or team navigate these uncharted waters. There is tact and there is a way forward, and now is the time to map out what that is.

The future is now here and we're in serious transition. As you map out what direction you take, understand that transition is never easy and always rocky. But what will always work, even with society changing in fundamental ways, is to be human focused first. Humans will remain, and a mindset of making sure our work empowers the person or the customer in some way must always be at the forefront.

AI marks the next chapter in human history. AI is the superstructure of our 4th Industrial Revolution, which is not some part of history but is occurring as we speak. Let's not just make something. Let's make sure, as part of our strategy, that we're making something for the people we hope to enliven with it.