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GPT-6 Astra

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Re: GPT-6 Astra

#661
post #563

I am really confused on how it can saturate ARC-AGI but still perform poorly on aggregated benchmarks: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models Perhaps if it was allowed this custom harness for all benchmarks it would similarily saturate?

The most straightforward answer is that despite efforts to design a benchmark that, in theory, is supposed to measure generalizable intelligence, performance on ARC-AGI-3 can't be reliably correlated to performance anywhere else. I kind of lost faith in it after o1 or o3, I can't remember which, absolutely crushed ARC-AGI-1.

And, you know, maybe also some funny business. I think it's good to be a little suspicious of a model that happens to shoot upwards in performance on a specific benchmark while also kind of keeping up with the pack on a bunch of other benchmarks.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#662
post #58

Just two days ago, a preprint by Julia Stadlmann went up on arXiv [0] improving the prime gap from 246 to 240. Now OpenAI announces Astra has shown a gap of 186 [1]. That must really blow. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31126 [1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/51126fac-1b68-4128-9666-c908bcc16...

What's just as interesting is this morning Axiom Math announced 212 and OpenAI then appears to have rushed out their 186 announcement just 1-2 hours later followed by Astra. Did they accelerate the release of Astra itself? Not necessarily, but it definitely looks like they ended up pushing much harder and faster than planned on their 186 result. X activity suggests Anthropic had a similar result as well but wasn't as fast as OpenAI in packaging it up and sharing it in response to Axiom, so they mostly just bolted onto OpenAI's messaging.

The reason I think this is interesting is that Axiom is a tiny lab in comparison that wouldn't have had access to Astra at all. I'd be curious to learn how Axiom is able to effectively compete at this frontier with vastly fewer resources.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#663

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…

They still seem pretty horrible at writing. Overly complicated prose, weird phrasing, poorly structured paragraphs. I don't know why they're so bad at communicating, but I feel very confident that humans are still much better at writing than any of these LLM models are, regardless of how advanced they are in other areas.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#664

What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning coding, math, etc, as we were told to do? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of a…

I have exactly the same thoughts - or perhaps slightly bleaker ones - evry time I read this relentless stream of news about new model releases. I’m tired of all the enthusiastic comments about how excited everyone is about the latest benchmark results and so on. I have a strong suspicion that many of those comments are written by people who are already financially independent, have millions in stocks, and can just si…

Are you doing less work now because of AI? Not sure about you, but I'm doing a lot more work. Not saying I like doing more, or how it's getting done, but nonetheless I don't feel like AI is doing what the CEOs of AI labs want to convince everyone of.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#665

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?

Because some people do.

Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#666
post #650

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…

I work for a larger german retail chain and agentic shopping is already on the "near future vision". No one thinks this will be used but somehow shareholders love it.

Lol same story here, I work in payments and 0 people within the company (including the team working on it!) are convinced at all about the viability

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#667

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 me AGI has always meant sentience. And only since we’ve discovered that you can have something that is intelligent without it being apparently sentient that we’ve changed the definition to being, I suppose, more exactly aligned with the namesake.

A real AGI, like the ones from science fiction, would make Astra look like a child’s toy. And I guess more concretely I would expect it to inhibit the following properties: one shot learning - fully (and always) online, perfectly efficient (through self improvement), no context limitations ie. persistently thinking, not just awaiting input.

So for me, no, not AGI yet. But still very intelligent and capable (and perhaps it’s safer this way?)

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#668

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…

I’m guessing the marketing must mean the AI-shops-for-you use case is a pretty big market, much bigger than AI-makes-life-easier.

Re: GPT-6 Astra

#669

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…

> even with Fable, I've been at the point personally where I am reasonably confident that there's essentially nothing that I am better than Fable at despite generally being substantively above average on human benchmarks If I asked you to write fiction, you'd be much better at keeping track of which characters knew which facts.

You could script this in with a time database, illustrations, and appropriate harness, tests, and editing passes. It's a massive problem with human authors too, which is why they do a lot of lorekeeping and editing, so the AI should be afforded the same tools if we are debating human level ability.

I agree on the one-shot (which is not a fair comparison because nobody oneshots a good story), but I'm not convinced this part hasn't reached AGI already.

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