"Astra can do a concerning amount with no chain of thought" by Neel Nanda

TLDR: Astra has 8.6x better odds of doing a reasoning task without CoT than the next best model (Fable 5.1), and can do 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in a forward pass vs 4.1 for the next best model (Gemini 3.8 Flash/Fable 5.1) Epistemic status: Heavily LLM-dependent research, and the precise results are somewhat sensitive to researcher decisions, but I’ve done enough sanity checks that I’d be surprised if the core claims were misleading One of the most striking things in the Astra report ...