alt Hacker NewsThis is really a great achievement: "Astra dominates the output token frontier"
Many labs used increased thinking to boost benchmark scores and performance. Most of the Chinese models were doing that for a while. Google and Anthropic as well.
Not OpenAI. 5.6 already was much more token efficient than other models and Astra beats Sol in token efficiency by a wide margin.
Edit: Just to make the point: Astra (max) has the 2nd highest score and the third lowest output tokens (among the models shown by AA).
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The apparent advantage is exaggerated by them running Astra at six different effort levels, and almost everything else at just the maximum available effort.
I don't really understand why they keep doing this. Either run and report everyone at multiple effort levels, or run everyone at only one.
But alsi, token efficiency seems pretty artificial? For example tokenizers are different from model to model. The cost/perf Pareto frontier seems a lot more meaningful (and Astra does very well at that too, just to be clear. It seems to be a great model.)
GPT-6 has a looped transformer / recurrent depth architecture, so it gets some internal CoT reasoning "for free" with no output tokens.
This also makes it much harder to monitor its reasoning.
[delayed]