Chrome, Sweet Chrome: The 1958 Classic That Won Her Heart
Christina Park fixed up her DeSoto Firesweep Sportsman after finding it at an estate sale
3 min
Christina Park, 24, a genetic counselling assistant at a children’s hospital who lives in Columbus, Ohio, on her 1958 DeSoto Firesweep Sportsman, as told to A.J. Baime.
My father started his company dealing in classic car parts when he was about 15, so since I was born, I have been around it. He was always rotating cars, new ones coming all the time. When I was 11 or 12, a DeSoto showed up on a trailer. I was just getting to the age where I was noticing cars, and what I liked and didn’t like. I liked fins, chrome and pretty colours. This DeSoto was all of that. I fell in love with it instantly, and, ever since, DeSotos have been close to my heart.
Most people, even up to my parents’ age, don’t know what DeSoto is, since DeSoto ended production in model year 1961. DeSoto was its own make of cars under the Chrysler umbrella, just like Dodge and Plymouth.
One weekend in 2016, my dad asked me if I wanted to go to an estate sale, which was a pretty common thing. When we got there, we found this DeSoto Firesweep Sportsman in the back of a garage, and it was for sale. Not too many people were there, and it was clear that no one had tried to start this car in many years. The colours were beautiful, and the car was similar to the DeSoto I had fallen in love with years earlier.
The Firesweep ended up coming home with us. I was 16, and, from the start, my dad said he would teach me what I needed to know to get it running and take care of it myself. But also, that it would be my car to do with what I wanted. When we started working on it, we were not sure how it was going to go. It needed a lot of TLC. We went through the usual mechanics. When we took off all the original belts and hoses, they cracked in our hands like pretzels. We put new tires on and polished the chrome. A year after we brought it home, it started right up.
It wasn’t my daily driver, but I started driving the DeSoto and, occasionally, taking it to school. Even people who were not car fans thought it was cool because of the paint and the chrome, and how different the styling was from anything you saw at the time. People were a little astonished by it.
Now, I have three DeSotos, but two of them are project cars that are not roadworthy. The Firesweep Sportsman gets stored through the Midwestern winters. But this time of year, I begin getting it ready for summer. I drive it to car shows and anywhere I can. Last summer, I put 1,600 miles on it. It is almost always the only DeSoto at a car show, so getting to show it off and talk about the brand is very rewarding.
I joined the National DeSoto Club even before I owned a DeSoto, and for the past two years, I have taken my car to the national conventions. It is a great community. A lot of the members are older, but there are younger people, and it’s so great to hang out with people who share this passion. The community is also very helpful if you have to find a rare part or need help doing something mechanically.
At the first national convention I went to, in 2022, I met the club’s magazine editor, David Frank. We started meeting up at other car events, and now we are two years into our relationship. He has a 1959 DeSoto Fireflite and, while he lives in Wisconsin and I live in Ohio, twice we have had our cars together. I guess I have gotten more than I ever could have expected out of my love for DeSoto.
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
A long-standing cultural cruise and a new expedition-style offering will soon operate side by side in French Polynesia.
From mud baths to herbal massages, Fiji’s heat rituals turned one winter escape into a soul-deep reset.
