“If Kathy calls, tell her I’ll be there at two.”

Of everything in Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video - the tablet, the video calls, the bow-tied agent - that throwaway line is the one nobody has delivered. Siri AI and ChatGPT both understand the sentence perfectly. Neither can do it properly.

This post started with a question. SmartFriend™ Peter Marks asked it back in January on marxy.org: Apple’s Knowledge Navigator - are we there yet? His verdict was close, with long-term memory and autonomous multi-step tasks still missing. “Not quite there, but it is within reach.”

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I ran the same seven hard coding tasks through five models. Every current model passed every test. The only things that differed were the bill and the stopwatch.

Update, 6 October, 4 pm. Hours after I published, OpenAI made GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol about 50% faster by default for people signed in with ChatGPT. I re-ran the Sol suite this afternoon and have corrected the numbers below. Old figures are struck through. Cost, token use, pass rate and quota burn did not change. I have not re-tested Astra.

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I have just spent three weeks off grid in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. No feeds, no headlines, no AI news. A proper digital detox.

Then I came home and opened the laptop. OpenAI had used the gap to unload DevDay 2026, and its own recap counts more than 20 major announcements.

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