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GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

magazine.sebastianraschka.com

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Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#61

Post by wilj »

enraged_camel wrote: post #24
iJohnDoe wrote: post #9

Probably off-topic. Astra has been kind of weird. Like, I can't trust it, weird. It has an interesting tone, especially in Codex, that is off-putting. It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. If OpenAI was chasing Claude's approach, then they are going in the wrong direction. OpenAI h…

>> It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. I gave Astra a pretty straightforward bug ticket yesterday. The bug involved an edge case that could sometimes result in an invalid value getting stored in a user profile field. Pretty harmless, no crash or anything, just annoying. Based on…

ChatGPT desktop this morning lost a chat thread while I was actively working in it. I asked Astra to find the lost session, and next thing I know it's prompting for full computer control to drive Finder. It's just jsonl files on disk, not hard to read normally.

Negative feedback filed and ChatGPT uninstalled.

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#62

Post by program_whiz »

throw3954 wrote: post #8
libraryofbabel wrote: post #2

Everyone interested in LLM internals should read Sebastian. He's great. The tldr here is that the recent "The Information" article[0] reporting GPT 6 Astra was using “recurrent depth” or “looped transformers" made it sound like it was some special new scary thing ("secret technique!") that made train-of-thought monitoring harder to do. In fact, it's just the same as stacking more transformer layers, except that you r…

It’s a little more complicated than that. While looped transformers can be unrolled a fixed number of times to save on memory, if loop depth is determined dynamically between tokens, a single transformer can compute any computable function between tokens. To analogize, current transformers run a fixed-length program per step. Any program can be factored into a top-level loop with a fixed-length branching body (an int…

Actually, removing CoT might make models safer, because we can analyze the entire landscape of their potential outputs, rather than a point-sample (we'll never know how close we were to "kill all humans"). By inspecting intermediate vector spaces, we can actually get certainty bounds on how safely the model is behaving (or even trending).

Wrote about it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-214402969

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#64

Post by binary0010 »

siva7 wrote: post #18

Astra was insane until Monday but something happened on tuesday, now it feels like Sol. I grieve for the lost productivity but i hope they may give us the original Astra back.

Disagree completely. I started using Astra from Sol the day it was released, and was a virtually imperceptable difference and made lots of mistakes and shit architecture decisions from day 1 of release.

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#65

Post by silversmith »

enraged_camel wrote: post #24
iJohnDoe wrote: post #9

Probably off-topic. Astra has been kind of weird. Like, I can't trust it, weird. It has an interesting tone, especially in Codex, that is off-putting. It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. If OpenAI was chasing Claude's approach, then they are going in the wrong direction. OpenAI h…

>> It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. I gave Astra a pretty straightforward bug ticket yesterday. The bug involved an edge case that could sometimes result in an invalid value getting stored in a user profile field. Pretty harmless, no crash or anything, just annoying. Based on…

Why is your agent able to call ssh. Why can it trigger 1password. Why are you giving metaphorical guns to metaphorical toddlers. Why is it not sandboxed. Your practices worry me.

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#66

Post by pixl97 »

siva7 wrote: post #58
scrlk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be related to this announcement from Tibo on Sunday: > We've made some improvements that improve usage on the long tail for power users of Astra when logged in with your ChatGPT account. > No change in quality and a pure win that on the long tail can result in up to 3-4X less usage being drawn from the subscription. https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2096717905614524491 ( https://xcancel.com/thsottiaux/status/2096…

It seems to me the people working at OAI may believe all other humans must be a little bit behind intellectually.

I mean, in general they aren't wrong.

You can't fool everybody all of the time, but you can fool almost everybody most of the time.

But most of all, it's easy to fool yourself.

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#67

Post by tsunamifury »

namibj wrote: post #35
tsunamifury wrote: post #11

So the TL;DR here is that Astra's trick is that its a turbo-charged weaker model vs a larger heavier one-pass model -- and the turbo is instead of reasoning by 'talking out loud' and generating intermediary steps, the reasoning is able to be stored (probably as KV) and re-run as purely without the generation of the text. Making it more effecient to run successively and I assume more intelligent as the act of turning…

The big thing that was learned all the way back with UT and it's follow up SUT was that semantic nesting structure often incentivizes models that can deploy the very same learned structural parsing intelligence independent of how many layers of nesting had to be unwrapped for this structural pattern to surface. Think how a reverse polish notation calculator with reasonably limited data stack depth could run efficient…

Thank you. Your jargon was hard to follow but as I understand it this separate linear and non linear reasoning. And it able to parallel process both

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#68

Post by sobellian »

siva7 wrote: post #18

Astra was insane until Monday but something happened on tuesday, now it feels like Sol. I grieve for the lost productivity but i hope they may give us the original Astra back.

I thought the same, but on second thought I merely had to deal on Tuesday with a lot of the mistakes Astra made on the preceding days. I wonder if this time lag of consequences explains why the sentiment is so common with these models. It probably also cautions against irrational exuberance when you first crack open a new model and it one-shots various problems, as you don't yet know what goats Astra had to sacrifice to make it so.

Re: GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

#69

Post by NineStarPoint »

boredatoms wrote: post #55
baby wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they introduce stronger quantization after a few days?

For sure they quickly move to q8, the output quality difference to bf16 is small compared to the speed/capacity gain

Yeah q8 made so littler difference back when I was testing such things I'd be surprised if people could quickly notice that as a change. It's got to be either further quantized or some other type of optimization that kicks in when people notice the drop.
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