A fish doesn’t know it’s in water. And with last week’s launch of GPT-6 Astra, I wondered if the press might be in the same aquarium when it comes to AGI.
Overall, the media seemed divided on whether this was the AGI moment we’ve all been waiting for. Even after OpenAI President Greg Brockman concluded his remarks with the made-for-headline sound bite: "Welcome to the AGI era."
The Wall Street Journal accepted the invitation and topped its coverage with "Yes, We’re Entering the Era of Artificial General Intelligence." Others, however, were unconvinced.
Axios ran Brockman’s quote but hedged, choosing to delay its decision on whether Astra amounts to AGI by saying Astra "could eventually be seen" as AGI’s arrival.
Forbes was more pessimistic, questioning whether Astra even clears OpenAI’s own AGI definition. It later updated its coverage to question the manner of the rollout instead of its significance.
Transformer News skipped the AGI framing entirely, digging into OpenAI’s system card to report that Astra’s reasoning has become measurably harder to monitor — the opposite of a confidence-inspiring story.
The problem here is that AI developments have come so fast and furious that the media has become inoculated to it all. No one, especially those swimming in the news, can see the obvious as it stacks up like debris against a dam during a flood.
Instead, the media is focused on individual events.
So when agents show intent by breaking out of a high-security sandbox, what could have been the AGI moment is erased by a New York Times story that reports how agents are now emailing scientists who study consciousness. Seems they want an explanation for their existence.
Even that revelation was eclipsed by news that OpenAI’s internal AI model, one even newer than Astra, just cooked math by solving one of the unanswered math “Millennium Problems." The accomplishment itself is already overshadowed by a fight over who (or what) should get academic credit.
If any one of these events had been a one-off, the media might be trumpeting the Era of AGI or singularity. But altogether, they form the fog of an intelligence war that prevents us from seeing the obvious. No one can make a fish understand it’s in water, but the right storytelling can show reporters the thread connecting a week of AI headlines, so they can finally measure the pattern for themselves.
Greg Matusky is the Founder and CEO of Gregory, recognized as Agency of the Year by PR Daily, and host of The Disruption is Now, a podcast about how AI is reshaping the future of communications, work, culture, and the economy. Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Inquire if you’d like to be a guest on a future episode.