Jobs Boom, Astra Reactions, Cybercab Roll Out, The Dyson Debate | Hunter Somerville, Bar Winkler, Bridgit Mendler, Carina Hong & Ken Ono

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
Watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:01)
Today is Friday, September 4th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN UltraGome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

**Jordi Hays** (0:11)
That's right. Let's get that Christmas countdown.

**John Coogan** (0:15)
First, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. How many days?

**Jordi Hays** (0:25)
There we go, 111 days until Christmas.

**John Coogan** (0:29)
111 days until Christmas.

**Jordi Hays** (0:30)
The Christmas countdown is helpful because, one, gives you something to look forward to, but it also is a subtle reminder that you only have 111 days left in this year. Yeah. It's game time.

**John Coogan** (0:42)
It is. It is.

**Jordi Hays** (0:43)
It's game time.

**John Coogan** (0:44)
Well, we're excited for it. Big news in the AI world, obviously. Astra GPT-6 launched yesterday. We went through the blog post briefly. It went up mid show.
A bunch of impressive benchmarks. We talked about Arc AGI. We moved the goal posts because Arc AGI V3 is now saturated, which is particularly crazy because of how detailed those games are when you play them.
The thing that stuck out to me though, was watching the demos of people build 3D scenes in Blender using Astra. Clearly a bunch of people got access to the model before and were able to fire off one prompt, maybe a few prompts. It feels like it's very, very capable to just fire a Blender and do a full task and model a whole world.

**Jordi Hays** (1:39)
That said, Matt Schumer, who had a couple of the most impressive examples, he has been talking about how the art of prompting is back.

**John Coogan** (1:49)
Oh, interesting.

**Jordi Hays** (1:51)
He had a very specific process where you have like a loop. Manager agent and subagents. Yeah. And it's still not as simple as just like, you can get a good output doing in one shot, but to get some of these really incredible outputs does take a little bit of refinement.

**John Coogan** (2:09)
Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of that information will propagate across the internet as it already has. I'd love to pull up some of the images from, or the videos from the launch from folks who are actually test driving GPT-6 Astra.
First, Sharif said, GPT-6 Astra recreated the Palace of Fine Arts in Blender. This is my favorite building in San Francisco because it was built for the World's Fair in 1914 I didn't know that. Where the steam locomotive and telephone were showed off. Wow. It was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future.
I feel like some of that sense has been lost since, certainly. But I hope models like Astra can help restore it and push us towards a more hopeful future. So if we can play that actual video, you can see. So I imagine that it pulls images from the internet. There's a whole bunch of obviously reference diagrams. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could ground a 3D modeling exercise. You could even pull the blueprints. There might be free models out there.

**Jordi Hays** (3:14)
Yeah, there's probably architectural plans.

**John Coogan** (3:16)
And yeah, it's this odd thing where you could use an AI image generator because the AI image generators are knowledgeable about what the Palace of Fine Arts is. It could generate a bunch of images there. So there's all these different ways to triangulate it. And then you can also just go on, I think Sketchfab is one of the big free 3D model purveyors online. And so you could potentially go grab an actual 3D model build off of that for your scene. So there's all these different ways to solve a problem. And Astra seems to be good at actually going and doing it. There's a few more that we should look through. There's one comparison since this is the new Pelican bench apparently.
Same prompt, same goal of creating this fly through video for a real estate scene. And this feels like something that could be useful. I've already seen on Zillow, there is the ability to re-style images. So if you're looking at a house on Zillow, you can see the interior photos. And then you can say, I'd like to re-decorate this in a modern style or in a contemporary style or in a colonial style. And it will go and use AI image generation on the backend to do that. It's only available on a fraction of Zillow listings. It's clearly some sort of feature that they need to turn on. But you could imagine this being something, especially for spec homes that are selling that maybe haven't been, that they don't have the budget to actually go do proper rendering, just lowering the cost, you get sort of a Jevons Paradox moment.