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GPT-6 Astra

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671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#671

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…

Despite access to """"""AGI""""""" all the marketing teams at these companies can only dream up 2 things, buying plane tickets and online shopping autonomously. Sometimes they're feeling extra spicy and throw in sorting emails or something along those lines. I suspect it's because it's tailored towards VCs and other similar rich ghouls as a replacement for their overworked and underpaid secretaries

Don’t forget making podcasts and telling you what to bake with your kids

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#672

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.

I’ve found Sol performance to be incredibly spiky. It has tremendous IQ and can fix very difficult bugs. But it is horrible at design (both visual and system design), anything that involves thinking about users or UX, and massively overcomplicates almost all work.

I vastly prefer Sol. It does what I tell it to almost exactly, pretty much every time.

I work on very low level stuff (think RTL/FPGA, firmware, software where optimising for nanoseconds is just normal).

For me Sol is the only cost effective model available. Fable 5.1 is indeed good and vastly better than original Fable (which refused to work on most of my stuff for 'safety' reasons).

It's very good at this sort of low level stuff to the point that I really can't understand/relate to people having a good time with Opus (which comparatively performs extremely poorly on my particular workload).

I also just don't like how lazy Anthropic models are. They will do 10% of what is asked and then summarily declare victory.

Sol on the other hand is more like "one of us", slight touch of the 'tism, extremely pedantic, will go to the edge of the known universe if that is what it takes to prove/fix/build what you asked for or run out out of credits trying.

It's a personal and workload dependent thing. For me right now Sol for 99% of stuff because Fable 5.1 still burns through $5k in credits a day.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#674
post #476

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.

> Sol is so much better than Fable 5 I'm genuinely so confused when people say this with a straight face. Are you talking about coding? Desktop use? Prose? Or something else? Sol is a much smaller models and it shows. It often misses the forest for the trees.

I feel like a lot happened this week and people are glazing how ridiculously strong Flash 3.8 is right now compared to Fable/Opus/Sol/Astra.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#675

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

#677

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

#678
post #386

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

#679

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

#680
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?

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