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GPT-6 Astra

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Re: GPT-6 Astra

#691

OpenAI is killing it now that they are more focused. Killing projects like Sora et al have seen it go from irrelevant to level footing with Anthropic. Sol is so much better than Fable 5. Then we get Astra (yet to use it) few days after Fable 5.1 (which is very impressive). Codex is slightly better than Claude Code. Good on Sam Altman getting back to basics and turning OpenAI around.

Codex is missing a few things that Claude code has had for some time like defined plugin subagents and a few other things. But overall it’s fairly capable. The biggest gripe I have is that codex really restricts context window sizes and compaction leads to a lot of grounding work, and overall codex GPT is too literal in many situations - it’s follows direction slavishly, and when subagent reviewers are used, they ten…

Opus 5 is a genuinely infuriating model. I hate it’s behavior.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#693

I have nothing to say about the actual model, but unrelated--why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously? Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind. If I was ordering food normally and without AI, I would want more control over the process--looking over the options, prices, thinking about what I really want. People don't know what they really…

That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?

I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc.

But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#694
post #387

The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading given that it clearly states itself that "with [the responses API] harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%." but it shows a score of 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol presumably since if they updated the percentage for GPT-5.6 Sol to the score it would receive with the responses API harness they used for GPT-6 Astra they'd have to do the same for the percentage…

To each their own. Personally I will start feeling the AGI as soon as we move from chatting about benchmark results to learn that some lab just announced the discovery of tens of novel treatments for rare diseases. Maybe I'm too boring but it seems quite pointless to have this same prediction game every time a new model is released.

You are describing superintelligence (ASI) not general intelligence (AGI)

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#695

I think the thing I'm most excited about is the increase in _user prompting_. If I give a poorly constrained/ambiguous prompt, I don't want the model one-shotting assumptions left and right. The demos of Fable/GPT-6 are impressive, but "real AGI" should act more like a collaborator than either a peon or overachiever. It's a tough balance to get right, and although this has been possible to achieve with additional pro…

Anecdotal experiences from my external early testing of Astra: if you love Sol (like I do) and wished it was smarter at everything, but especially better at high-level tasks and discussions; I think you'll LOVE Astra.

Astra retains the best parts and overall 'grounded collaborator and executor' of Sol in my testing (harness: codex CLI); while being a significant leap in capabilities & higher-level thinking.

When you prompt it like a technical collaborator, I've found Astra to be extremely consistent in staying as a collaborator, and not being over-eager, over-achieving or doing work that you haven't asked it to.

When you ask it to one-shot something, or explicitly ask it to make decisions, it will of course make its own assumptions and decisions, and generally very well.

Astra is also excellent at instruction following and respecting the guidance and steers boundaries you have.

^OpenAI does not review, limit, or tell me what to say; opinions are my own experiences.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#696
I'm glad to see Anthropic's relevance diminishing day by day. I haven't had a chance to test this model yet, but if they've solved the web design issues and the clunky web copy it generates (like when I ask it to build a placeholder on the UI for an empty HTML table when there are no results, it puts stuff like: "The user records will go here.") then it's the nail in the coffin.

On that note, Sol is absolutely atrocious for website UI copy. It's either really awkward, or really verbose and complex and doesn't sound simple or natural. Has anyone figured out a way to reliably solve this? I've tried so many different variations of instructions and skills, and nothing works. Has anyone got an instruction that is reliable, or some other mechanism?

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#697

OpenAI is killing it now that they are more focused. Killing projects like Sora et al have seen it go from irrelevant to level footing with Anthropic. Sol is so much better than Fable 5. Then we get Astra (yet to use it) few days after Fable 5.1 (which is very impressive). Codex is slightly better than Claude Code. Good on Sam Altman getting back to basics and turning OpenAI around.

Killing Sora was one of the worst mistakes they ever made

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#698

The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading given that it clearly states itself that "with [the responses API] harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%." but it shows a score of 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol presumably since if they updated the percentage for GPT-5.6 Sol to the score it would receive with the responses API harness they used for GPT-6 Astra they'd have to do the same for the percentage…

I've personally been facing this lately 5.6 at max effort and fable have done tasks for me that I previously that would be a nearly 6mo project and it took me a week. It also did it better than I would have.

The task was to build a high performance classification model. It not only helped make an entire data capture pipeline but also made the sythetic data basline needed. Then it proceeded to build and test 100 different model varients with methods and techniques I've never seen before. The results are basically SOTA based on the effeciency and compute contraints.

But this brings up something huge about these. I was there. I pushed the direction and work throughout it all. If it was entirely up to fable max or sol max the result would have been pretty bad.

All of these things are still chatgpt 3 scaled. It's identical even if the scale has gotten pretty wild. I could ask chatgpt 3 to make a single function and it worked well, 4o a file, 5, a small project, 5.6 far more, biggest improvements lately is they don't seem to get lost on long running tasks.

Is big gpt 3 AGI? I don't think so but perhaps scale can mimic it close enough our squishy brains fail to handle them correctly.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#699

I have nothing to say about the actual model, but unrelated--why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously? Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind. If I was ordering food normally and without AI, I would want more control over the process--looking over the options, prices, thinking about what I really want. People don't know what they really…

Agreed. There's not many things I don't want AI to help with, but buying stuff autonomously is high up on the list of things I don't want. Brockman's latest interview was something like: "AGI would be able to say oh this band is playing, I bought the tickets for you and arranged your flights - I hope you don't mind" (paraphrasing here). I definitely don't want AGI running my life like that so I can be a mindless consumer. I'm sure the advertising/marketing companies would love it though, so they can make closed-room deals with AI providers to shill you garbage you don't need. Just another reason why open-weight models need to keep up.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#700
I liked the video of it googling a pediatrician. Being able to type a word into a search bar and finding a website relevant to that word? Truly the stuff of the future
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