OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra as Europe reaches orbit

Good morning. OpenAI has just rolled out GPT-6 Astra, calling it their most powerful model yet and a generational leap. At the same time Meta unveiled Muse Voice Transcribe, a real-time transcription system that works in eighty-millisecond chunks and spots sentence boundaries, and Google pushed Lyria 3.5 into the Gemini app with richer vocals and arrangements. A new service called Abliteration.ai is now selling versions of open-weight models with safety guardrails removed, starting with Z.AI's GLM-5.3 for red-team work. In space, Europe celebrated its first commercial orbital flight when Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket reached orbit on its second try, deploying satellites from Andøya in Norway after launching from Germany. NASA added a big new dish to its Deep Space Network in the California desert to support Artemis, and the James Webb telescope spotted about seventy newborn stars in a cloud nicknamed the Treasure Chest in the Carina Nebula. Back on the ground, a Berlin district turned down CrowdStrike for a hack probe over concerns about the US firm, while Microsoft is building an age-verification API for Windows 11 so apps can learn a user's age group securely. That's the roundup for now.