Astra Is Hard to Monitor

OpenAI’s central message on Astra is that it is three things: Highly capable and can do all the things for you. Hard to monitor. The most aligned model. The first claim largely checks out. Astra and Fable are both clearly excellent models. This post is about their second claim, which to their credit they are being loud about, in three parts: The system card result, affirmed on Twitter by several OpenAI employees including Tomek Korbak, and in an excellent post by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki that I covered yesterday, that Astra is harder to monitor. OpenAI’s use of recurrent depth and the internet’s immune reaction, including some people reading too much into what happened there. Discussion of what to do about monitorability going forward, to fight for it and avoid a race to the bottom. In An Alien Mind, Jakub Pachocki makes clear OpenAI’s primary bet is on CoT monitoring. He also outright says, ‘our ability to rely on CoT monitoring is progressively diminishing.’ The system card…