GPT-6 & OpenAI’s Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer’s Scandalous Legacy

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
OpenAI releases GPT-6 and says it's AGI. Has it retaken lead? How serious should we take the hugging face attack anyway? And Steve Ballmer steps in it. That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. If you're following where Enterprise AI is actually going and want to get deeper than the headlines, you're going to want to check out Genesis Experience 2026 this September. With two full days of free life keynotes streaming from Las Vegas on September 2nd and 3rd, you'll learn about agentic orchestration, the new operating model for customer experience, and real stories from organizations already deploying AI at scale. I'll be there, filming interviews for our YouTube channel. Experience 2026 is where enterprise leaders learn how to turn customer experience into growth, and you can watch it all live. Register free at genesis.com/experience/broadcast.
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk all about OpenAI's new GPT-6 model. It says it's AGI and has it finally come back and taken the lead over Anthropic.
We're also going to talk about the hugging face attack, and there was also another attack according to a new Reuters report where bots coordinated on a German wiki website. So we're going to talk about whether this is again, whether this is marketing or whether it's time to finally take these attacks seriously and we're going to go a little bit into the intricacies of what happened. Finally, Steve Ballmer, the legacy does not look good.
Of course, we're talking about the fact that he was directly involved in this scheme where the Clippers paid Kawhi Leonard according to the MBA, lots of money to not show up to certain jobs to subvert the MBA salary cap. What would a Labor Day Weekend Friday edition look like without some Steve Ballmer talking here to do it with us? As always is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Welcome back.

**Ranjan Roy** (2:01)
If Kawhi Leonard was paid to not show up, our listeners, I can tell you Alex Kantrowitz is showing up because if you're watching this on YouTube, you will see a beautiful new studio that Alex is going to be broadcasting out of. Alex, did you set this up yourself? This thing is gorgeous.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (2:19)
That's right.
We do have a new studio. I did not set it up myself entirely.
Everything that you can see behind me was my doing. Everything that you can't see, which means the camera, the lighting, and all of the settings, that was done with some help. But I definitely did get the paneling from Amazon and nail them to the wall panel by panel. We don't even have a hammer, so I was nailing them to the wall with the back end of a wrench. So if one falls on me during the show, you understand why.

**Ranjan Roy** (2:52)
That is a New York City living toolboxing and like being a handyman.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:00)
Well, we did have a hammer, but I couldn't find the hammer, and the panels needed to go up. So you got to do what you got to do.

**Ranjan Roy** (3:05)
You got to do what you got to do. AI is not going to replace that. Let's just, let's just...

**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:10)
Well, I don't know. After the latest release from OpenAI, maybe it will. So OpenAI released GPT-6 yesterday. And remember the big wait for GPT-5, when's it coming and the expectations? This kind of came seemingly out of nowhere. We have GPT-6, Astra, and not only does it crush on the benchmarks, OpenAI is saying that it might be AGI, and it's obviously geared towards a lot of sort of personal assistant use cases. So let me just read a little bit from what The Verge reported on this. So The Verge says, OpenAI's next big AI model has entered the AGI era.
The next big model is here, it's called GPT-6 Astra. The company calls it a generational leap in capability for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science and computer use. The actual, this is, I'm just going to read from OpenAI's branding here. They say it's GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you fast. They, of course, released a snazzy video, as they tend to do on these releases, with showing people in front of a big computer, asking it to do things for them, like book tables, build a presentation, create legal drafts.
Basically, the idea here is that their new model is going to excel at computer use and be able to get things done for you. It's very interesting that they use, they highlighted voice as the interface to get it done, almost like the personal assistant computer in Star Trek. So, Ranjan, your thoughts about the release of GPT-6? I'm curious to hear your initial reaction, but also we talk a lot about the fact that even recently, I talked about how it looked like Anthropic was opening up the gap between itself and OpenAI.