Hot take on GPT-6 Astra

Hot take on OpenAI GPT-6 Astra*1, with a challenge to Greg Brockman’s claims about it being AGI toward the end:

• Looks to be pretty impressive. Multiple reports suggest it is a genuine advance.

• As someone who has campaigned for nearly a decade for (neuro)symbolic world models, often to exceptional hostility, it is extraordinarily vindicating to see that a product from OpenAI explicitly creates and manipulate symbolic world models in the course of some of its most impressive computations.

• What we don’t know is how robust that capability is. That is THE key question.

• Success on ARC-AGI is great and impressive, but not —despite the name of the task—proof of AGI; I suspect we will see loads of problems with open-ended real world tasks. As with other recent models I would suspect best performance in verifiable domains.

• And as a scientist, it’s disappointing that we don’t (yet?) know much about how the system actually works.

• Without a clearer sense of what’s under the hood, I feel less confident about both what it can and can’t do, and what new risks we may encounter. I doubt the world is ready.

• As ever, enthusiasts got an advance look; skeptics did not. That’s a sound marketing strategy, but it often turns out to be misleading. What we have often seen is initial enthusiasm that gets tempered over time. I suspect we will see that here as well.

• The new system appears to be less monitorable than prior systems, which is not great from a safety perspective. One really doesn’t want more capability in conjunction with less monitorability. But also more alignable, not sure why.

• Would be great to see whether Astra can make progress on any of the ten tasks that Miles Brundage and I bet on at the end of 2024. (No AI to date has succeeded on any, AFAIK.)

Subscribe now