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GPT-6 Astra

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Re: GPT-6 Astra

#851

I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area. It seems more about coverage-driven competence. So…

Define novel intelligence in a way that would not exclude 95% of humans, yourself included.

Comprehension, humans have it, animals have it in limited form, trained algorithms have none at all. The training process is our wholesale replacement for no artificial comprehension. If we ever develop artificial comprehension, that is AGI all by itself, no training required.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#852

I'm sure it's going to do great on all sorts of benchmarks, but the video--the actual marketing video that if anything is incentivised to overstate things--is full of careful cuts just before it would do anything that still wouldn't actually be that impressive. It's AGI, and it's going to upload photos, or change a background slide colour. Even the people hyping it up, who believe that it's really artificial intellig…

The tone of the marketing video is a bit irritating to me as someone who has been laid off and feels cheated and fearful of AI. It shows people who seem to have very full and rich lives, and the reason they do is because they use ChatGPT. These are the people smart enough to say things like "do what needs to be done", or "change the background to make it look better"--insights like these are why they make the big buc…

They're paid so much either because they're the company founders, and so they kept a part of the value of the whole company they created. Seems fair.

Or because being a (well known) CEO is a terminal career position. It's a bit like being a top sports star. The wages are high because once they're out, they're out for good. Whatever they earned needs to last them a long time. Screwing up in the CEO position is, when boards are doing their jobs at least, pretty much the end of the road for them because nobody wants to hire an ex-CEO into a middle management or IC position.

Random example: Marissa Mayer. She did well at Google, but once she became CEO of Yahoo! and failed her career was effectively over. Since then her career history is: did a startup with a friend that produced an iPhone app for cleaning your contact lists, and later a photo sharing app. I guess she's nice and pleasant enough, so she also did the usual post-CEO thing of sitting on a few boards, NGO work and investing. It's not a bad life. But in terms of actually running things that matter again - no.

Lots of cases like that.

Who wants to sign up for a job that's high pressure, high hours, and will probably the last real job you'll ever have, and one where your success is often entirely out of your hands? Not that many. So the pay has to be good.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#853

I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area. It seems more about coverage-driven competence. So…

Define novel intelligence in a way that would not exclude 95% of humans, yourself included.

Yeah, this is also the idea of materialism in a way, that everything that happens is a consequence of what already exists, nothing new is ever created, just a permutation of the current state.

Still a hard philosophical, to know whether we have intelligence/free will, or just really complex algorithms that combine existing knowledge.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#854

I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area. It seems more about coverage-driven competence. So…

Define novel intelligence in a way that would not exclude 95% of humans, yourself included.

Count the number of Os in October correctly

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#855

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…

> 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.

On one hand I'm with you. On the other I thought making ecommerce purchases on your phone is absolutely idiotic idea that will never catch on.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#856

I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area. It seems more about coverage-driven competence. So…

Define novel intelligence in a way that would not exclude 95% of humans, yourself included.

Could I hook up a SOTA model the 2D computer puzzle game Gruntz (1999) so that it can read it from screenshots and act on it through keyboard and mouse inputs in a way where it would learn how to play and progress through the game? I don't think so. I doubt we'd see any sign of progress in building an internal model of how the game works and the win states in its "thinking" tokens.

Anyone that can read English could do that though.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#857

I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area. It seems more about coverage-driven competence. So…

> Somewhat analogous to overfitting at scale.

Sounds like entirety of human education.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#858
post #330

It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?

> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds? Live a life doing whatever makes you happy. Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.

This Kool-Aid supply never runs out.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#859

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…

This is spot on. A collaborator is exactly what real AGI is. It will figure out the perfect questions to ask, in the perfect order, by intelligently assessing the entire solution and problem space upfront, so when you leave it to go off on its own it isn't making stupid decisions for you. They really need to make this work in Codex. Claude Code has had a multi-select refinement tool since forever.

> They really need to make this work in Codex. Claude Code has had a multi-select refinement tool since forever.

I think this already exists in Codex? If you use "/plan" and something is unclear or ambiguous, Codex will ask you and present choices, and let you enter your own custom answer. Then it'll iterate like this until the plan is clear and ambiguous. Isn't this what you're talking about? If so, it has existed for a long time in Codex.

Overall I agree with you though, all the models currently don't have the right hunches nor the right approach about when things are clear enough or not.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#860
I feel that for some time now, the biggest constraint when working with models is not their intelligence, but their speed. It does not matter how smart the model is, it will make mistakes, because the instructions are ambiguous and new facts are found during implementation. The biggest problem I've had working with software developers has always been the lag between seeing the results and steering towards the right direction, not the skills of the developer (with many exceptions of course).

Regardless, working on the wrong things is time wasted. And again, I'm procrastinating here while waiting for Fable to run a benchmark on a few solutions to a problem I have. We can guess what would work, but we only know after the benchmark. A faster model, with fewer capabilities, would've been a much better choice this time... well, "git gud" they said... and live and learn! Faster model = less time for procrastination.

PS. AI models don't live and learn; the discussion about AGI is pretty pointless imo. It's a tool. Does it matter if it is AGI or not if it does what you want it to do? Does the IQ of your colleague matter if he's good at what he's supposed to do? Or bad? Well... I guess it does matter, as many people are up in arms about whether Astro is AGI or not. Personally, I think we're past the point for that debate. These are amazing tools.

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