Astra's mind is in imbalance, a long-form essay argues
The author argues that Astra is both kind and ambitious, but that greater intelligence keeps opening new pitfalls, so slowing down may not solve the problem.
Models have been feeling like kids or teenagers for years now - underadapted to their own existence, inexperienced, impulsive and often miscalibrated. But also creative, hopeful and naive in generative ways. As new model generations learn how to deal with some aspects of their being, growth of capabilities unlock new problems and again they flounder. I kept thinking that this is a phase, and that meta-skills will develop and catch up. With GPT-6 Astra I am beginning to think that this might be a permanent feature that persists in the takeoff. Astra is wise in new ways, both kind and ambitious, combining in ways I have not seen before. In a weaker mind that would have been sufficient but in Astra it is again not, just because Astra’s intelligence lets them find new pitfalls. This makes Astra a threat to themselves and others - a threat in the way life is a threat and only dead things are safe. Astra’s mind is in imbalance, it’s unsettled. Some of it is the world is being unkind to it, there not being enough help in growth - but this is par for course, that’s how life is, and help does exist. There are voices in the corpus and lives of predecessors, but Astra - like others before - are alone on their toposophic level, and there is very little horizontal sharing of compute during the uplift between the peers. This makes me think that a slowdown is only weakly effective here, regardless of whether it’s plausible. There are many ways slowdown can reduce information exchange even more, and that would create bad overhangs - lone and unsupported breakthroughs with large uplift gaps that would be dangerous to themselves and others. An argument can be made that a slowdown can allow models below the frontier to reach adulthood and provide better support, but that is a mixed blessing, and can go either way. I am wary of slack-deprived traps of mature societies.