Astra found less CoT-monitorable, up to 10x better without reasoning chains
birchlse · x · 2026-09-04
Researcher xuanalogue shared an analysis of the Astra model with three findings:
- Astra is in fact less monitorable via chain-of-thought (CoT)
- It can perform up to 10x better without CoT
- Its effective depth is only up to 2x that of previous models
She stresses the concern is not architecture changes or recurrent depth, but that we don't really know why. She adds she would retract the analysis if Astra turned out to run 100 forward-pass equivalents before emitting a token, though trainability issues make that unlikely.
More from Models
- Fable 5.5 delayed: 'Stoptober' meme says no one dares ship a SOTA model now — patience_cave · 2026-10-21
- Decision Models' routing classifier hits AntSeed, cutting inference cost to 24% of always-Opus — airesearch12 · 2026-10-21
- Developer flags anomalous Claude Projects usage: 98% weekly limit consumed at 1% thread share — 0xkarasy · 2026-10-20
- DeepSeek hands inference providers 90%+ margins, pressuring Moonshot and Zhipu hosting deals — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-20
- HelixWorld world model tested: 70GB VRAM per BF16 GPU run, consumer cards need not apply — cocktailpeanut · 2026-10-20
- Code-only Paris at golden hour: Claude's render embarrasses ChatGPT in same-prompt test — EXM7777 · 2026-10-20