RUMOR: OpenAI Astra model used "Looped Transformers"
We studied the 𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐚𝐰 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬: arXiv 2506.18233
The main discovery is shown in the figure:
1. Loop does NOT increase knowledge capacity
2. Loop is effective in increasing reasoning capability
That being said, the benchmark gains does not come from knowledge gain, but from reasoning gain, e.g., the way the knowledge is being used.
Knowledge capacity and reasoning capability is disentangled by looping layers, as shown in the green dots. As model size grows (dot size grows), the knowledge capacity (x-axis) does not grow, but the reasoning capability (y-axis) grows.
In non-looped transformers, as shown in the blue dots, the knowledge (x-axis) and reasoning (y-axis) grow at the same time.
This might reveal another scaling axis that brings a new paradigm for LLM pre-training.
I want to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4.
OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique, as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution. I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it, and it's a core goal of our current research program.