alt Hacker News>made it sound like it was some special new scary thing that made train-of-thought monitoring harder to do.
It's not a "scary new thing" but ultimately no-one knows exactly how OpenAI have implemented looping. You might not be aware/remember but MoE transformers perennially underperfomed their dense counterparts until GPT-4. Similarly, making reinforcement learning really work with transformers wasn't figured out until o1.
And by Open AI's own admission, Astra's CoT is significantly harder to monitor and it exhibits a significantly greater control over its own CoT than any other model released.
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0c3ca83 • today at 4:29 PM
"Don't worry, it'll make us rich -- and that's nearly the same as everything being just fine"
Well sure, that's the possible weak point in Sebastian's article: it could be true that there's some more sophisticated stuff going on in Astra around looping, because OpenAI haven't specified their architecture. But it's always been true that, since we don't know what's in their black box, there could be arbitrary amounts of innovations inside the models that we could speculate about. So the question is, does knowing they use "looped transformers" really add any dramatically new information that we should worry about? And what this article is saying is, not really, because the mostly likely pattern that's referring to is just, effectively, stacking layers and reusing weights.
> And by Open AI's own admission, Astra's CoT is significantly harder to monitor and it exhibits a significantly greater control over its own CoT than any other model released.
Oh sure; I don't think anyone is denying that larger issue? But does it have anything to do with looping?