alt Hacker News> it authored a program to analyse and fix the weights.
This is a difference without much distinction, at least to me. It's like being upset when someone says that Claude made a http call -- of course the LLM didn't make the call itself, it used a tool to do it.
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The distinction here is the equivalent of Astra passing the pelican test by prompting an image generation model versus emitting the SVG.
The former will likely produce a much higher quality image, but claiming it as a demonstration of Astra's capabilities would be a lie.
It obviously is an important distinction to the paper's authors, which is why they used the modifier "native" to mark it as a distinct form of communication than what's already been on the market for years (coding agents). But it's not native, or rather some of the results were native but they mixed toy-scale native results with non-toy-scale non-native results for marketing purposes.
This is like someone telling you they made a "native" brain-to-brain interface but it's just a tin-can phone.
No it's a huge difference. Someone who can quickly compute 123^456 in his head has a very different skillset to someone who uses a calculator.