OpenAI has released a teaser for its yet-to-be-launched flagship model Astra, featuring footage from the 1979 MIT experiment "Put That There," which was presented at SIGGRAPH in 1980. The footage is credited to the Media Lab, Chris Schmandt, and Eric Hulteen. The teaser does not provide product specifications or a launch date.

The experiment was completed by the Architectural Machine Group, the predecessor of the Media Lab, with related spatial data work funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In the video, the operator sits in front of a large screen wearing a position sensor and says "put that there," while the system combines the spoken pronouns with the finger's location to move graphics; subsequent demonstrations can create, copy, and schedule ships on a Caribbean map. The speech recognition vocabulary is around a hundred words, with grammar tailored to the scene and requiring pre-recorded speaker voices. The first author of the paper is Richard A. Bolt.

The research's starting point is not achieving 100% accuracy in speech, but recognizing that speech will never be perfect, thus requiring additional channels, syntactic semantics, context, and immediate feedback to improve "effective accuracy." When instructions are ambiguous, the machine will ask "which one," "where," or "relative to what." Gestures make pronouns usable, while speech provides precision. This is a frequently cited prototype of multimodal, referential dialogue in the history of human-computer interaction.

Astra is currently in a scaling and compensation period: paid users who cannot use the new model on the same day will receive a storage reset, as the company has slowed down the release due to network capacity assessments. Placing the 1979 laboratory footage at the beginning frames the next-generation model as one that "understands incomplete sentences," rather than another keyboard dialogue box. The experimental hardware consisted of dedicated sensors and a fixed graphical world; today, achieving the same task in a cluttered workspace with long tasks requires generality, not just slogans.

In market mechanisms, what is bought is the imagined premium of a multimodal agent, while what is sold is the yet-to-be-seen Astra interaction manual. Attention shifts from failures and limits to a segment of public domain laboratory footage. The beneficiaries are model companies that need to redefine product categories; the pressured are subscription users still measured by chat boxes. Tribute does not replace specifications; the opening cannot serve as a release note.

Supplement: The paper clearly states that combining speech with simultaneous pointing makes pronouns natural; pointing with speech makes reference precise. Without either, the phrase "put that there" does not hold.

Source: Public Information