Tech Express | September 4, 2026 — OpenAI Launches GPT-6 Astra, Declares the AGI Era

1. OpenAI Launches GPT-6 Astra, Declares the AGI Era

Source: Sina Finance

In the early hours of September 4 (Beijing time), OpenAI officially launched GPT-6 Astra, its next-generation flagship model, calling it "the most intelligent and most aligned model in the world." At the event, president Greg Brockman declared "Welcome to the AGI era," saying OpenAI has achieved artificial general intelligence.

In benchmarks, Astra dominated: FrontierMath Tier 4 scored 97.6%, ARC-AGI-3 hit 99.9%, and ExploitBench achieved a perfect 100%. OpenAI says its "computer use" capability has reached human level, handling tasks such as PCB layout, tax filing, and report building.

Trained with OpenAI's largest compute to date — more than 100,000 GPUs at the Stargate supercomputer in Texas — Astra is also the first model trained with significant help from prior AI models. It is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Because testing surfaced two previously unknown day0 vulnerabilities, Astra is opening first to a small set of Daybreak Access institutions, with paid ChatGPT users and the API to follow in the coming days.

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2. NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Source: NVIDIA

NVIDIA announced it has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion. The company said the two will scale Hugging Face's platform and strengthen its infrastructure to make AI more widely accessible to developers and institutions worldwide.

Hugging Face counts more than 18 million developers sharing 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, with over 200,000 companies using the platform. After the deal, Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem — supporting multiple models, frameworks, clouds, and accelerators, with no requirement to use NVIDIA compute.

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3. Moonshot AI Kicks Off Hong Kong IPO

Source: ITHome

According to LatePost, Moonshot AI — the Chinese startup behind the Kimi model — has confidentially filed its A1 application with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this week, formally starting its Hong Kong IPO process. Moonshot AI responded that it "does not comment on market rumors."

Reports add that Moonshot AI is raising a new round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation, likely its last before the IPO. In July, the company completed an F round of more than $3.5 billion, lifting its post-money valuation to $35 billion.

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4. d-Matrix Unveils 3D-DRAM Chip with 100TB/s Bandwidth

Source: MyDrivers

At Hot Chips 2026, US AI chip startup d-Matrix detailed its Raptor 3D-DRAM accelerator for generative AI inference. The chip uses a face-to-face stack of TSMC N4 logic dies and 3D-DRAM, placing memory directly beneath the compute logic.

A single Raptor card packs 32GB of 3D-DRAM with more than 100TB/s of bandwidth — compared with roughly 18TB/s for a 192GB HBM4 setup. On efficiency, Raptor uses just 2.96mW per GB/s, a 13.5x improvement over HBM. Commercial products are expected in 2027.

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5. Moore Threads "Lushan" GPU Adds Hardware Ray Tracing

Source: MyDrivers

At its 2026 semi-annual results briefing, Moore Threads confirmed that its "Lushan" GPU, built on the "Huagang" architecture, is expected to launch within the year. It is China's first domestic graphics card with hardware ray tracing.

Compared with the previous S80, Lushan delivers 15x the 3A-game rendering performance and 50x the ray-tracing performance, with up to 64GB of memory — more than the RTX 5090's 32GB. In the first half, Moore Threads' revenue reached 1.736 billion yuan, up 147.42% year over year.

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6. iPhone 18 Series Prices Leak, Hike Looks Certain

Source: MyDrivers

On September 10 (Beijing time), Apple will hold its launch event for the iPhone 18 series. With memory-chip and other upstream costs rising, the new lineup is widely expected to see a price increase.

According to leaks, the iPhone 18 Pro could start at $1,249-$1,299, up from $1,099, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max could rise from $1,199 to $1,349-$1,399. The new top-tier iPhone Ultra may start at $2,099-$2,299, with top configurations possibly exceeding $3,000.

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7. Apple Cancels Foldable iPad/Mac, Huawei Left Alone

Source: MyDrivers

A new report from research firm Omdia confirms that Apple has canceled its foldable MacBook project. The device was a foldable iPad/Mac hybrid led by Apple CEO John Ternus, with an 18-20-inch display, originally slated for 2026 and later pushed to 2028.

The move leaves Huawei as the only player in the category: its MateBook Fold is the only foldable laptop in mass production, folding to 13 inches and opening to 18 inches, backed by more than 2,700 core patents.

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8. Hubble Spots a 10-Sided Decagon at Saturn's South Pole

Source: BBC Sky at Night Magazine

The Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers a view of a 10-sided decagon feature in the clouds at Saturn's south pole. NASA Goddard's Amy Simon said the most intriguing part is that it "seems to have just formed recently."

Study lead Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of Spain's University of the Basque Country noted that Saturn's north pole hosts the famous hexagon, but this south-pole decagon is a new phenomenon that "appears to be strengthening." The team will use Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope to learn more.

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9. ByteDance Phone Debuts Domestic LPDDR5X Memory

Source: MyDrivers

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) announced that the new Doubao phone, co-developed by ByteDance and ZTE, will be the first to use its LPDDR5X memory running at up to 10,667 Mbps. The company said this marks the first mass-production application of a domestic high-speed LPDDR5X chip.

The memory offers up to 16Gb per die, about 25% more bandwidth than today's mainstream 8,533 Mbps version, with 30% lower power than LPDDR5. CXMT is also developing a 0.58mm-thin LPDDR5X, potentially the thinnest in the industry.

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10. AI Education Enters Chinese Classrooms

Source: MyDrivers

This week, schools across China kicked off the autumn semester. Textbooks that began rolling out in fall 2024 are now fully deployed: all primary and junior-high schools have completed the replacement of the Chinese, math, and English textbooks.

Experts say overall difficulty is roughly unchanged, with a gentler learning curve: simple equations move from elementary to junior-high school, and elementary math adds ruler-and-compass drawing. Meanwhile, AI education is also entering classrooms at scale.

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