Can We Truly Control The Alien Mind?

Brian (0:00)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Today is Monday, September 7th, 2026 It's Labor Day here in the United States, as well as in Canada. So for anybody, hopefully has the day off if you're around these areas. If not, thanks for still joining us. Whenever you're catching us, we're live. Friday, Monday through Friday at 10 a.m., even when there's a holiday, even when it's Christmas Day, we've been live on the show. We've been keeping that streak going for over three years now, over 800 shows. This is episode 806 So make sure you come back and hang out with us, even if this is the first time you happen to see our show. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we're glad you're here. You can also be part of our community by going to The Daily AI Show community. That's a Slack community, it's free. But we just know that a lot of people, like our flying folks in the comments right now, not everybody can join us live. And we want you to be part of the community, even if that's the case.

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And you can sign up for the newsletter. And also we have conundrum episodes that go out every Saturday. So all the things, I want to make sure I get that at the front of the show because I tend to do that at the back end of the show when people are checking out and being gone for the day. With me today, yeah Beth, with me today is Beth. Yes, Beth.

Beth (1:21)

I just want to say because apparently I started this recently with Jen's birthday, but today is Gwen's birthday. Happy birthday, Gwen. And if you are a listener or a watcher of the show, let us know what your birthday is. We would be happy to give you a little birthday shout out.

Brian (1:38)

Why not? Yeah, I love it. Happy birthday, Gwen.

Very, very long time supporter, listener, follower, all the things. Yeah, so we will love you, Gwen. Thank you for always coming back and supporting us over the years. OK, so Andy was joking and saying there was no news over the week. Nothing has happened since we talked to you on Friday. Nothing at all.

And obviously, that's not true. It's actually been an interesting weekend. But for more than just maybe what you're thinking is the is the obvious choice, which would be Astra or GPT-6, both are totally fine to use. And we definitely want to dig into that because although I have not, I would imagine, Beth, you definitely have, Andy, maybe, maybe Andy? No, Andy, no. But Beth, I'm guessing.

Andy (2:25)

I don't have it yet. It hasn't been released to me yet.

Brian (2:28)

Oh, wow. You don't have it. OK.

Andy (2:30)

I'm on the pros.

Brian (2:30)

I actually have it, but because I've been working on other projects, it's very OK. So let me just rewind for a second because I definitely want to talk about Astra. However, I also want to talk about something really, really interesting called An Alien Mind, which I read that paper. That's an interesting one. And that came out of the Chief Scientist at OpenAI. It was just published yesterday on Sunday. So I definitely want to talk about what an alien mind is. What does that paper say? What does the Chief Scientist at OpenAI, who's been there for quite some time, actually. This is not a recent hire because he is talking about things that happen in 2017

So definitely want to get into that paper as well. Obviously, yes, we want to talk about Astra and GPT-6. What I was going to say about that model and the reason I haven't used it is because unlike Claude, where I have a hundred dollar a month subscription that I'm able to use, I really only have the $20 subscription for ChatGPT. If you have a $20 subscription and you have Astra, well, you kind of already know what's coming because like even on GPT 5.6 sole, which is still, what a great model that is. I've been using it more and more over the last week and just being overly impressed and I know people like Jeff and others are going to be in the comments and be like, yeah, we told you Brian. But it's been really, really good. Yes, I definitely want to use Astra, but here's the thing. It's like one or two prompts that have some reasoning to them on the $20 plan can wipe out a five-hour limit.