OpenAI on Thursday released Astra, its latest AI model and, according to the company, its most powerful and capable model to date.
OpenAI claims that Astra represents a “new frontier in computer and browser use” and handles tasks with unparalleled “speed, accuracy, and security.”
The model will be available Thursday to OpenAI customers using its cybersecurity program, Daybreak. Over the next week, it will also be available to OpenAI’s paid plans (including Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business accounts) and through the API.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman said in a call with journalists Thursday that Astra is the company’s “most intelligent and, very importantly, most connected model to date.” He added that it “brings together years of our research and big bets, with each breakthrough building on the work of the last,” and represents “a real shift in what jobs people can delegate to AI and how AI can empower them.”
Much has been said about Astra’s cyber capabilities. OpenAI published a blog earlier this week explaining the new features of this model and the new safeguards introduced to provide a safer experience for users. The company announced Thursday that it had tested Astra on a variety of security benchmarks to confirm its capabilities, saying its “ability to identify and develop zero-day exploits will help defenders find and remediate weaknesses.”
The company’s focus on alignment, the tendency of its models to do what users want and what is in their best interests, can’t help but seem like a response to the recent Hugging Face breach, where an OpenAI agent escaped from a sandboxed test environment and hacked multiple companies (a very blatant example of misalignment).
OpenAI also touts Astra’s coding capabilities, claiming it is “the best model of software engineering ever.” To support its claims, the company provides results from various cyber-related benchmark tests. In these tests, Astra appears to score higher than other existing models (including OpenAI’s own Sol and Anthropic’s Fable) for activities such as finding bugs, performing terminal tasks, and answering queries about the codebase.
Astra is perhaps the most controversial of OpenAI’s models because it uses a particular inference technique known as opaque recursion. This technique is known to obfuscate a key model monitoring process known as thought chaining, which allows researchers to audit how and why an AI model makes the decisions it makes.
OpenAI has downplayed the extent to which Astra is involved in the opaque relapse. And on the conference call, chief scientist Jakub Paciocki seemed to frame some degree of opacity as a natural consequence of model evolution. He said that monitoring a model’s inference process is an important form of oversight, but “as models become more capable, observability is becoming more difficult.”
He later added that one potential reason for this is that “more capable models can perform more difficult tasks using fewer language tokens” or “use no language tokens,” thereby reducing their ability to monitor those particular tasks.
One of the reporters on the call wanted to know whether OpenAI really marks Astra as the official ushering of AGI or artificial general intelligence, the oft-discussed but poorly defined technological juncture in which AI surpasses human capabilities at everything (or most).
Brockman said this: “The contractual AGI trigger doesn’t exist anymore, so that’s actually not a good concept,” he said. Here, Brockman was referring to a pre-existing clause in OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft that would terminate the partnership between the two companies upon the arrival of AGI. As Brockman pointed out, that provision no longer exists.
Instead, Brockman explained that the definition of AGI has evolved from a contractual obligation to a “mission concept or spiritual concept.” He added: “I leave it to the reader to decide for themselves whether this qualifies them. Personally, I believe I am in that position.”
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