holy fuck, AI almost caused an accidental war (yet another thing I warned the Senate about in 2023)

Hot take on OpenAI GPT-6 Astra*, with a challenge to @gdb’s claims about it being AGI toward the end: • Looks to be pretty impressive. Multiple reports suggest it is a genuine advance. • As someone who has campaigned for nearly a decade for (neuro)symbolic world models, often to exceptional hostility, it is extraordinarily vindicating to see that a product from OpenAI explicitly creates and manipulate symbolic world models in the course of some of its computations. • What we don’t know is how robust that capability is. That is THE key question. • Success on ARC-AGI is great and impressive, but not —despite the name of the task—proof of AGI; I suspect we will see loads of problems with open-ended real world tasks. As with other recent models I would suspect best performance in verifiable domains. • And as a scientist, it’s disappointing that we don’t (yet) know much about how the system actually works. • As ever, enthusiasts got an advance look; skeptics did not. That’s a sound marketing strategy, but it often turns out to be misleading. What we have often seen is initial enthusiasm that gets tempered over time. I suspect we will see that here as well. • The new system appears to be *less* monitorable than prior systems, which is not great from a safety perspective. One really doesn’t want more capability in conjunction with less monitorability. • Would be great to see whether Astra can make progress on any of the ten tasks that Miles Brundage and I bet on at the end of 2024. (No AI to date has succeeded on any, AFAIK; link: garymarcus.substack.com/p/wh…) ——————- *This hot take is VERY tentative, pending more information about how it works and what its limitations are.