OpenAI launches Astra, its powerful (and controversial) new model

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, its latest AI model and — according to the company — its most powerful and capable one yet.

OpenAI claims that Astra represents “a new frontier on computer and browser use,” and that it handles tasks with unmatched “speed, accuracy, and safety.”

The model is being made available Thursday to OpenAI customers that use Daybreak, its cybersecurity program. Over the next week, it will also become available through OpenAI’s paid plans — including Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business accounts — as well as through its API.

In a call with journalists on Thursday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said that Astra was the company’s “most intelligent and, also very importantly, our most aligned model yet.” He added that it “brings together years of our research and big bets, with each breakthrough having built on the last” and that it represents a “real shift in what kind of work people can delegate to AI and how it can empower them.”

Much has been made about Astra’s cyber capabilities. OpenAI published a blog earlier this week in which it discussed the model’s new capabilities, as well as new safeguards that have been instituted to make it a safer experience for users. The company said Thursday that it had tested Astra on a variety of security benchmarks to ensure its capabilities, and that “Its ability to identify and develop zero-day exploits can help defenders find and patch weaknesses.”

The company’s focus on alignment — that is, the tendency of a model to do what a user wants or is in their best interests — can’t help but seem like a response to the recent Hugging Face breach, in which an OpenAI agent escaped its sandboxed testing environment and hacked several companies (a very blatant example of misalignment).

OpenAI has also boasted about Astra’s coding abilities, claiming that it is the “best model for software engineering to date.” To back up that assertion, the company provides results from a variety of cyber-related benchmarking tests. Those tests seem to show that Astra scores higher than other existing models — including OpenAI’s own Sol and Anthropic’s Fable — when it comes to activities like finding bugs, executing terminal tasks, and answering queries about codebases.

Astra is also possibly OpenAI’s most controversial model yet due to its use of a particular reasoning technique known as opaque recurrence. This technique is known to obscure an important model-monitoring process known as chain of thought, which allows researchers to audit how and why an AI model made the decisions that it did.

OpenAI has downplayed the degree to which Astra engages in opaque recurrence — and on the call chief scientist Jakub Pachocki seemed to frame a certain amount of opacity as a natural outgrowth of model evolution. He stated that monitoring the reasoning process of a model was a critical form of oversight but that “as model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging.”

He later added that one potential reason for this was that “more capable models can perform harder tasks using fewer language tokens” or “no language tokens,” which he said then reduces the ability to monitor those particular tasks.

One reporter on the call wanted to know if OpenAI was actually heralding Astra as the official arrival of AGI, or artificial general intelligence — the oft talked about but poorly defined technological juncture at which AI surpasses human capabilities in all (or most) things.

Here, Brockman quibbled. “There’s no contractual AGI triggering anymore, so that’s actually not a relevant concept,” he said. Here Brockman was referring to the previously existing stipulation in OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft that said the duo’s partnership would dissolve once AGI had arrived. As Brockman noted, that stipulation no longer exists.

Instead, Brockman explained that AGI’s definition had evolved from a contractual obligation to a “mission concept or spiritual concept.” He added: “I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. For me personally, I do think we’re there.”

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