GPT-6 Astra Claims Top Spot in Perplexity’s Research Agent Rankings: 13.5% More Performant Than Fable 5.1, 6.1% Cheaper

At 8:30 PM Beijing Time, the U.S. will release its August non-farm payrolls (NFP) report. The market expects non-farm payrolls to rise by 56,000, following an unexpected decline of 23,000 in July. Economists’ forecasts range from a drop of 25,000 to an increase of 121,000, reflecting significant market divergence over labor conditions. The unemployment rate is projected to hold steady at 4.1%, though some economists forecast it will rise to 4.2%; annualized wage growth is likely to cool from 3.2% to 3%. Morgan Stanley’s chief economist Michael Gapen estimates that the revocation of temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants could drag down non-farm payrolls by around 15,000, while a rebound in employment in local government education, leisure and hospitality sectors may provide support. Most economists believe that unless the NFP data brings a major surprise, the report is unlikely to directly decide the interest rate outcome of the Federal Reserve’s September 15-16 meeting, as market focus will shift to next week’s Consumer Price Index (CPI). Fed Governor Waller clearly stated on Thursday that if upcoming data confirms cooling inflationary pressures, he is inclined to support keeping interest rates unchanged this month. Currently, the market expects a 50% probability of a September rate hike, down from 63.2% on Wednesday.

According to GMGN data, the stock-meme project GME (GameStop) on Robinhood Chain briefly saw its market capitalization exceed $16 million, hitting an all-time high. It has since retreated to $14.2 million, with a 24-hour gain of over 440% and trading volume of $4.3 million. GME leverages the Robinhood stock trading platform, pairing with tokenized U.S. stock GameStop (ticker: GME) as its liquidity pool, using the GME/GME trading pair to provide liquidity. BlockBeats Note: Stock Meme refers to an emerging trend that combines traditional meme coins with tokenized U.S. stocks: instead of pairing meme coins with USDT or ETH, they are directly matched with on-chain U.S. stock tokens (such as NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, etc.). This retains meme coins' high volatility and community-driven speculative attributes while tying to the popularity and narrative of real stocks. A portion of transaction fees typically flows back to the community treasury to accumulate corresponding U.S. stock tokens, forming a dual-driven model of "sentiment speculation + real asset anchoring". Prices are highly volatile; investors should exercise caution.

Dongcha’s Beating AI News Flash: OpenCode has launched another anonymous model, Omen Alpha, but its identity appears to have been exposed early. OpenCode’s own data page directly lists it under Zhipu. Zhipu has not yet officially acknowledged the model, nor has it revealed which GLM model it is. This comes just 9 days after the previous anonymous model was unveiled. Previously, Zhipu used the alias Ox Alpha for GLM-5.3-Flash, offering it for free testing on OpenRouter and OpenCode. It only officially revealed the model’s true identity and opened its weights on August 26. This time, there’s no free access: Omen Alpha is only available to OpenCode Go subscribers paying $10 monthly, with the plan including $100 worth of Omen usage. It charges $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.66 per million output tokens—roughly 30% higher than GLM-5.3-Flash’s official price. However, GLM-5.3-Flash is currently on a 50% discount, so Omen Alpha is about 1.6 times more expensive at current rates. Omen Alpha’s official specifications remain unannounced: OpenCode has not disclosed details on its context window, input modalities, or maximum output. Some in the community speculate it could be a new GLM-5.x or Omni variant.

CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. stated that Bitcoin is approaching the threshold to enter a bull market. Over the past 24 hours, BTC’s price rose 3.9%, while open interest increased by roughly 11,200 BTC, a 3.4% jump, signaling the current upward momentum is primarily driven by the derivatives market. Data shows open interest once surged by 15,200 BTC within 6 hours, pushing the leverage flow pressure index to 63; long positions were added for 15 of the past 24 hours. Adler pointed out that if a rally is mainly fueled by short covering and liquidations, open interest typically declines, but this time it has risen notably instead, meaning new futures leverage is the key driver of the price increase. His one-year model has not yet officially flipped to bull market territory. Confirmation signals require Bitcoin to close above the model’s dynamic threshold on a daily basis and hold that level without a rapid unwinding of leverage; the main risk is that accumulated leverage could be liquidated suddenly, triggering a market reversal.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S.-listed AMC (the U.S. cinema chain operator) is up more than 18% in pre-market trading, currently trading at $3.02.

Dongcha Beating AI News Flash: OpenAI may soon update its image generation model. Community researchers unearthed strings including "imagegen-25-announcement-modal" and "imageGen25Announcement" in the latest Codex Desktop frontend, and forced the hidden announcement pop-up to display. The pop-up reads "Major upgrade for image creation", highlighting higher image quality, faster generation speeds, and smarter creation tools.