Slightly off-topic to this model card but has anyone noticed changes to GPT6 Astra about a week after 6.1 came out?
I feel like 6 Astra just turned a lot lazier during planning and strangely enough claude has become a lot more assertive with Opus 5.5 while it used to be very lazy.
It’s really obvious during planning, it used to be that claude would just give a best effort guess and handwave things but now it will actually write small tests, launch playwright to test a hypothetical and even look things up in github during a question. This was something codex’s models were really good at.
I’ve read so many stories about people claiming models getting nerfed after a new release and now it seems I can finally join them.
But Astra is in a different league when it comes to doing research and investigative tasks that require exploration.
For my usecases, Astra is pareto frontier - it dominates Fable 5.1 on cost. Fable 5.1 is a phenomenal model but Astra is cheaper and uses way less tokens and steps to produce similar output.
Sol 6.1 is incredibly incredibly slow, 20t/s slow (vs the ~70-80 of Terra 6.1 and Luna 6). It wouldn't be so much slower if it was just a distillation, surely? There's something else going on there.
I felt like I had a read on it right away – it's a 6[.0]-series model, and not named after space since it's specialist model, and I assumed it was named after Rosalind Franklin. Looks like the docs back that up, that it's based on Astra, which is not [yet?] at 6.1.
Last I checked machine learning wasnt the bottleneck for drug discovery and where it fits in the research process was largely solved 5+ years ago.. Weren't there already a ton of ML based drug discovery startups that went out of business, or got aquired, not because they werent useful but because they produced more candidates than the industry could use.
I dont think I want researchers offloading their thinking to some specialty model after seeing what its done to me and my colleagues in software, it certainly isn't making anyone more competent.
It really only enables people to be able to do less novel and lower quality work faster.
OpenAI and Anthropic creating these platforms seems mostly just to create narratives around AI that its going to lead to cures for disease, which it wont, but plenty of normies assume it will cure cancer now. Also a bunch tech oligarchs who are equally convinced or 'one-shot' they're going to live forever because of language models lol.
Promises of the Fountain of Youth continue to be a time tested tools for snake oil salesmen.
I feel like 6 Astra just turned a lot lazier during planning and strangely enough claude has become a lot more assertive with Opus 5.5 while it used to be very lazy.
It’s really obvious during planning, it used to be that claude would just give a best effort guess and handwave things but now it will actually write small tests, launch playwright to test a hypothetical and even look things up in github during a question. This was something codex’s models were really good at.
I’ve read so many stories about people claiming models getting nerfed after a new release and now it seems I can finally join them.
If you use Codex, Claude Code, etc, those are being constantly updated. That sort of behavior would be highly harness dependent.
Didn’t Sol-6.1 top Astra? Or is it maybe that Astra is still a larger model and therefore can comprehend deeper complexity better in the long run?
No, Astra is still smarter (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/?models=gpt-6-astra%2Cg...).
On specific coding skewed benchmarks yes.
But Astra is in a different league when it comes to doing research and investigative tasks that require exploration.
For my usecases, Astra is pareto frontier - it dominates Fable 5.1 on cost. Fable 5.1 is a phenomenal model but Astra is cheaper and uses way less tokens and steps to produce similar output.
My assumption is Astra is the biggest model in terms of param size and has the most intellectual horsepower.
But Sol-6.1 is more instruction tuned to perform better on the average use cases for most users, so it benchmarks better and feels better to use.
My feel is it's the opposite of a "detune".
Sol 6.1 is likely a distillation that's highly instruction tuned and designed to perform better on benchmarks.
For-profit corporations shouldn't have this power, this is not democracy.
I dont think I want researchers offloading their thinking to some specialty model after seeing what its done to me and my colleagues in software, it certainly isn't making anyone more competent.
It really only enables people to be able to do less novel and lower quality work faster.
OpenAI and Anthropic creating these platforms seems mostly just to create narratives around AI that its going to lead to cures for disease, which it wont, but plenty of normies assume it will cure cancer now. Also a bunch tech oligarchs who are equally convinced or 'one-shot' they're going to live forever because of language models lol.
Promises of the Fountain of Youth continue to be a time tested tools for snake oil salesmen.