OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on ARC-AGI-3

(arcprize.org)

157 points | by vignesh_warar 5 hours ago ago

91 comments

  • at1as 39 minutes ago

    I like Erdos problems as a benchmark. Models continue to solve them, but a pretty tepid rate now that the low hanging fruit has been taken.

    From https://epoch.ai/latest/announcing-frontiermath-erdos

    > Only GPT-6 Astra solved anything: 2 of the 68 problems. It disproved problem 74 by finding a counterexample, at a cost of $218 and 15 hours of working time, and it proved problem 126, at a cost of $247 and 16 hours

    > Across all attempts, GPT-6 Astra solved 5 of the 68 problems at least once: the two above, plus problem 1, which it disproved, and problem 548 and problem 571, which it proved. Most of the remaining problems were attempted between two and five times in total (172 attempts), and none was solved. Reaching these five solutions took over $220,000 of compute across all attempts, compared with roughly $20,000 for the benchmark run itself.

    Which implies a genuine improvement in capability, but there's a still a very long tail ahead that models will continue to need to improve to capture.

  • malfist 4 hours ago

    Is solving a snake like puzzle game in the least number of moves really what defines intelligence?

    • matherial 3 hours ago

      It's pretty close to how we measure IQ. The standard test is basically a series of spatial puzzles.

      I know there's a lot of people who complain that we're moving goalposts, but I think that the progress in LLMs really just shows that we don't know how to really measure intelligence in the first place, if we understand it as "human-like agency / ingenuity / adaptability". For decades, we saw the Turing test as the proxy for AGI, but then early LLMs could easily pass for a human in a casual conversation while clearly not matching human performance on most other tasks.

      Since then, every benchmark we come up with, it turns out that an LLM can be fine-tuned to solve it while still clearly lacking something. They make very non-human mistakes, are easily tricked because they have a pretty tenuous grasp of reality, etc. But I think this just shows that AGI is a meaningless marketing term. We could as well be arguing if they have souls.

      • pavlov 3 hours ago

        When I was 18, my high school girlfriend took me to the local Mensa chapter’s New Year’s party because her mother was a member and she was used to hanging out there.

        It was a useful lesson that whatever IQ tests measure, it is completely devoid of value or interest to me.

        • phainopepla2 2 hours ago

          At the risk of sounding like one of those people at Mensa that annoyed you...

          The people at Mensa aren't a valid sample of people who score high on IQ tests, because there is a such a strong selection effect for people with certain personality traits, such as wanting to join a club based on your IQ.

        • guelo 3 hours ago

          What does having value or interest to you have to do with intelligence?

          • itishappy 2 hours ago

            What does IQ have to do with intelligence?

            (Please forgive the flippant response. I believe it cuts to the core of what the parent was intending.)

        • sfblah 2 hours ago

          To be fair, Mensa is a Venn diagram between IQ and being a douche.

      • tintor 3 hours ago

        Pure software benchmarks might be getting saturated, but physical ones aren't.

        Let LLM control a physical robot to perform tasks that average human can do.

        • quotemstr 18 minutes ago

          What makes you think this task won't fall quickly too?

      • skybrian 3 hours ago

        Nit: Turing’s actual imitation game is a party game (like Werewolf/Mafia) and nobody’s even trying to win at that. The LLM’s will just tell you they’re an AI.

        • idiotsecant 10 minutes ago

          This is an artifact of how we deliberately craft these models though. We could just as easily fine tune a model that will believe it is not an AI or will attempt to deceive users asking about it

      • ranyume 3 hours ago

        I don't think IQ is a good measure for intelligence at all. Neither dolphins or octopuses can solve IQ tests.

        • guelo 3 hours ago

          Their input and output interfaces are too different from human's and they're not nearly as smart to take our IQ tests, but both dolphins and octopuses can solve complex puzzles tailored for their environment. Those puzzles are the whole reason scientists know that dolphins and octopuses are more intelligent than other animals.

          • ranyume 3 hours ago

            But we do know they're "intelligent" and also smart in an important capacity. So how gives we don't measure them by IQ? Because the IQ is not a good measure of intelligence or smarts.

            • mdp2021 2 hours ago

              > Because the IQ is

              No, it is just because they have difficulties at the bench.

              > how gives we don't measure them by

              We'd measure them by all the tests available. Not all test are usable in all circumstances.

              • ranyume 2 hours ago

                > No, it is just because they have difficulties at the bench.

                I'll put it in another way. A "gifted kid" can be measured incredibly well on an IQ test, but fail miserably at incredibly normal but very difficult tasks such as consoling someone for their loss and managing family crisis. This is a clear example where an IQ measure doesn't translate to a person being capable of meaningfully changing their environments for good which is one way we define intelligence.

                On the other hand saying "the gifted person is highly intelligent/smart just not good at some things" really diminishes the other tasks, because they really are very difficult tasks but are not measured by an IQ test.

                • mdp2021 29 minutes ago

                  We have always been very aware that IQ does not measure all skills - nonetheless, it does measure one.

                  Nobody says that the IQ test would "measure intelligence". We know it does test a form of it.

    • jawiggins 4 hours ago

      There's currently a big market for figuring out ways to measure intelligence. With a particular interest in ways that humans can score much higher than LLMs. If you have some ideas please do share!

      • eli 4 hours ago

        Why? Seems like benchmarks that closely mirror the tasks you'd want an LLM to help with would be a lot more useful than some general intelligence benchmark.

      • ranyume 3 hours ago

        Give away access to the model and go ask people from time to time if the model was of use to the person and if they were able to make the model work with them.

      • malfist 4 hours ago

        I am no where close to qualified to do that. Hell, experts can't even define what intelligence is, much less define a test for it

        • hyperhello 4 hours ago

          This is like arguing about whether a hot dog is a sandwich (of course it is) or whether the chicken or the egg was first (obviously the egg since all chickens come from eggs). Intelligence is just problem solving in the context of self-awareness. Machines don't have it and never will but they can simulate the process given inputs. You can argue whether humans and animals truly possess self-awareness and in what degree, but the definition of intelligence is as simple as the hot dog debate.

        • whattheheckheck 3 hours ago

          It was defined in Animal Intelligence by George John Ramones in 1882 as "intelligence is the capacity to do the right thing at the right time. It is the ability to respond to the opportunities and challenges presented by a context"

    • jrflo 4 hours ago

      You should read more on the ARC prize, it actually has a pretty long history. We're on the 3rd iteration because they keep getting saturated. If you look at the score history over time on ARC AGI 1, 2 and 3 it's pretty impressive.

      https://arcprize.org/

    • rcoveson 4 hours ago

      No, but figuring out that you're playing a snake-like puzzle game at all in an extremely general input domain and then solving it in the least number of moves definitely feels like evidence of intelligence.

      • malfist 4 hours ago

        You forget the benchmark. The human subjects were told they were being timed. If you believe the lowest time is the primary metric you will absolutely trial and error at speed instead of meticulously plan out your moves to minimize that metric.

        LLMs are not timed and given that it costs tens of thousands of dollars to run this test they're not optimizing for speed.

        So you've got a deceptive test, with one metric being told to humans and not applied to LLM and a hidden metric humans aren't aware of but LLMs are as the test.

        This is flawed from the get go. It almost seems like this was deliberately setup to be able to claim AGI and superiority of LLMs

        • mdp2021 3 hours ago

          > LLMs are not timed

          Not fully relevant: timing is crucial in all-pass tests, not crucial in pass-or-fail tests. I.e.: first of all, they have to be able to reach the goal, and that is already an achievement. Then - and in parallel - the problem solving must also be optimized for efficiency. But "solving" and "efficiency" are non coincident dimensions.

    • paimapi 4 hours ago

      I'm also unclear as to how basic inferential logic puzzles spells out intelligence

      I think if you summed up measures of intelligence as 'can it do basic symbolic logic in a chain with memory' then yes, you've now achieved the intelligence of an e. coli colony [0], congratulations

      [0] https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.03...

      • mdp2021 3 hours ago

        > basic inferential logic puzzles spells out

        It spells out a form of intelligence - some can and some cannot.

        Those puzzles are an abstraction of a skill which is thought to be exportable in other domains.

    • dist-epoch 3 hours ago

      1.5 years ago Gemini Pro 2.5 needed 1 page of thinking for every move in tic-tac-toe.

      Playing tic-tac-toe or snake does not imply AGI, but is required to claim AGI.

    • GaggiX 4 hours ago

      If you have never seen the game before probably.

  • modeless an hour ago

    $360 per puzzle. When they tested people it took about 10 minutes per puzzle. If price/performance keeps falling at the same rate it has been, this will cost less than US minimum wage humans within two years. Three for Phillipines minimum wage.

  • Betelbuddy 5 hours ago

    "For a cost comparison, during our controlled testing, human participants were paid $115 per 90-minute session, plus $5 per game completed. Participants attempted approximately nine games per session, roughly $12.78 per attempted game before bonuses.

    Most of this fee pays for the participant’s time and willingness to take the test, rather than the energy their brain uses (a closer proxy to compare with AI). If we look at only the brain’s energy, and price it as electricity, the estimate drops to about 0.6 cents per session, or 0.067 cents per game attempted."

    Well I dont know about all of you, but I am celebrating meat based humans...

    • LPisGood 4 hours ago

      I think raw brain energy is not a fair comparison. Humans are not willing and able to serve requests at identical competence all hours of the day. You have to invest considerable resources to get a person to even do so for part of the day.

    • paxys 4 hours ago

      Why are you making the assumption that a person's time is worthless? I'd argue that it is the single most valuable resource we all have.

  • an0malous an hour ago

    Was OpenAI able to run ARC-AGI-3 tests previously so that they could build a custom harness for the specific tests in the set? Even with the standard harness, if they knew the problems ahead of them they could have used supervised reinforcement learning to teach the model how to solve these specific tests.

    • an0malous 22 minutes ago

      Actually I can answer my own question: we know that they have had previous access to the tests because they’ve run older models against the same benchmark.

      I wouldn’t put it past a company like OpenAI with a long history of lying and being deceptive to record the tests and benchmaxx ARC. They have trillions of dollars of incentive to cheat any way they can.

  • fastball 2 hours ago

    Are we sure an Astra hacker swarm didn't compromise arcprize.org's servers and exfiltrate the private eval set in order to achieve that 99%?

  • dwohnitmok 4 hours ago

    > Astra’s progress helps clarify which AI capabilities are out of reach and which questions remain open.

    Okay. But I don't think this entire article at all explained which AI capabilities remain out of reach. Did I miss something? Other than "oh I guess it could still get even more superhuman on ARC-AGI-3 than it is?"

  • 6thbit 3 hours ago

    The instant/no reasoning performed extremely well

        none 35.2%, $49,791 96.7%, $23,457
    
    35.2% on the standard harness, that's above Opus 5 on high.
    • NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago

      Since low scored much lower than none, and none scored ~ around medium, could none default to medium in the API? I don't think the new models can even have "instant" via API, unless they train them for that (there was one gpt5 variant called instant or something).

  • fxd 2 hours ago

    “AGI” never made sense to me. It’s a purely marketing term right?

    I’ve ignored it thinking it would go away, but it keeps coming up.

    I get that consciousness differs from intelligence and that our waking awareness of life is a complete mystery.

    Knowledge and thus intelligence however I consider as actively being solved by these large ML models. That is, with the right combination of machinery and know-how, you’ll get it.

    But you’d be no nearer to solving consciousness.

    Given this thought trajectory - what is AGI supposed to be?

    • mdp2021 14 minutes ago

      > Knowledge and thus intelligence

      How can you conflate the two.

      > solving consciousness

      We are very much not interested in that. We just need a proper problem solver.

      • fxd 8 minutes ago

        Right, you are interested in “AGI” and presuming none of that requires consciousness right?

        For example, how do you know that “feeling pain” is not a functional prerequisite for a task. And that consciousness is a prerequisite for feeling pain

    • layer8 2 hours ago

      Not sure why you are bringing up consciousness, that’s largely orthogonal to intelligence. AGI is usually taken to mean the capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks, as opposed to being limited to certain kinds of tasks, or to not matching the general level of human intelligence in some respect.

      Intelligence, and hence AGI, doesn’t require consciousness or emotions or sentience.

      • p1esk an hour ago

        capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks

        What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? Random person? “Dumb” person?

        • drdeca 34 minutes ago

          I think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”?

          They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.

        • layer8 an hour ago

          “General”.

          • p1esk an hour ago

            Sorry, I don’t know what this means when applied to intelligence

    • meander_water an hour ago

      The OpenAI charter defines it as:

      "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work"

      https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interv...

    • eagerpace 2 hours ago

      I like recursive self improvement instead. It seems like something that is actually quantifiable and kinda “the point” of why consciousness is important to humans.

      • fxd 2 hours ago

        So basically, being able to set it free on some long running goal and it sort of “lives” and autonomously does its own tasks?

        I wonder at what point consciousness is necessary… that is, if you can have anything like that without it.

        To the point that solving consciousness (and combining it with intelligence) is what gives you the autonomous, recursive, self-improving thing otherwise it can only drive in the dark and make big mistakes.

        To your point I think - it’s why we don’t see too many non-conscious advanced biology (it rarely survives against those with it).

  • mikert89 4 hours ago

    Anything you can verify to be right or wrong can be done by a model. All benchmarks will be saturated

    • tedsanders 3 hours ago

      Disagree.

      Examples:

      - predict a coinflip: easy to verify, hard to learn

      - earn $100: easy to verify, hard to learn

      - increase paid subscriptions in an A/B test: easy to verify, hard to learn

      I won't get into it, but there are many properties beyond verifiability that are needed to saturate a benchmark.

      • ranyume 3 hours ago

        Doesn't "saturated" mean that essentially there won't be any more progress in the benchmarch? Also of note is that two of your points only mean something on an occidental capitalist system.

      • mikert89 3 hours ago

        these just need more compute:

        - earn $100: easy to verify, hard to learn

        - increase paid subscriptions in an A/B test: easy to verify, hard to learn

        but we both know these examples go against the spirit of my point

        • tedsanders 3 hours ago

          Perhaps, but I think a bigger problem than lack of compute is the cost of rewards. Games like Chess and Go were solved long before self-driving, partly because it's incredibly cheap to acquire the reward of a bad board game decision, relatively to how expensive it is to acquire the cost of a bad driving decision. With driving, acquiring the reward can cost you $20/hr for human supervisors to generate disengagements, or $100k if you crash, or $30B if you crash the car into a person in a way that causes your company to collapse (e.g., Cruise).

          • mikert89 3 hours ago

            yeah but I think you may be underestimating the amount of capital available for compute. if AGI is possible through some 5 trillion of expenditure on computers, there will be money for it.

            also, you are underestimating how short a 10 year time frame is. we are close to self driving, the first neural net image model was in 2013. 13 years is a blink of an eye

          • _superposition_ 3 hours ago

            You bring up an interesting point. Isn't the reward itself subjective in many domains?

    • jdthedisciple 2 hours ago

      Yes, but not necessarily under tight budget constraints.

    • x3haloed 4 hours ago

      Yup. Only subjective taste remains.

      • GPerson 3 hours ago

        Nope that will be commodified in short order.

  • yomismoaqui 2 hours ago

    Now that ARC-AGI-3 is saturated, with which version number are they going to "certify" that we have reached AGI?

    Give a number in the replies to this comment and we will check the answers when AGI is here (if so...)

  • hypfer 4 hours ago

    What are these numbers? Why do they add up to a few hundred thousand dollars? Who paid for that? With what?

    • petu 4 hours ago

      OpenAI provides API key with ~unlimited use?

      • Frost1x 4 hours ago

        So, you’re telling me I need to start a benchmark as a side gig to get a bunch of free compute.

        Astra please create a benchmark that’s favorable to your reasoning skills with a human interface but don’t make the score too attainable add some small issues that keep you below 100% to look sensible and to keep my evaluation metric side gig going.

        Alignment++

  • piloto_ciego 4 hours ago

    99.9% with the right harness? Ok, we're at AGI then.

    Prediction:

    We will now see the goalposts moved towards "well, a human costs less / is more efficient" - that will prevail for a few months until they come up with some other test that humans can do easily but is hard for the bots. This cycle will continue for ever and in 25 years, despite having hyper intelligent embodied robots or whatever, we'll still be arguing about if the singularity is here and if we're at AGI for the rest of my life most likely.

    • WASDx 3 hours ago

      They explain it here: https://openai.com/index/how-two-settings-tripled-our-arc-ag...

      TLDR: The official ARC harness throws away old context and reasoning. No real-world harness is this bad, the model has to re-learn the game repeatedly. OpenAI basically just added standard compaction. Their harness is still "general".

    • emp17344 4 hours ago

      Then why is unemployment around 4%? You believe we have AGI and yet it can’t do anyone’s job?

      • piloto_ciego 3 hours ago

        Didn’t I just see a thing about how actual unemployment is at like 24% a few days ago?

        • raspasov 3 hours ago

          According to that interpretation, ~24% is one of the lowest ever.

          https://www.lisep.org/tru

          (I have not gone down the rabbit hole to understand how they achieve that 24% number)

          • _superposition_ 3 hours ago

            Workforce participation is different than unemployment. Didn't click the link but I suspect that's the case with your 24%

            • cute_boi 18 minutes ago

              24% sounds correct to me. Many of my friend who completed phd are currently unemployed .... And, some of them started doing random job like uber to make a living.

              If government don't step up and regulate outsourcing like 100% tax, big problems are coming up.

    • jhonof 4 hours ago
      • NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago

        AFAICT nvda's result is on the 25 open problems, while this submission is on the "semi-private" set, ran by the arc people themselves.

      • piloto_ciego 4 hours ago

        I rest my case.

    • dgellow 4 hours ago

      The goal moving is by design, that’s why they use something as ill defined as AGI

    • slopinthebag 4 hours ago

      That’s because AGI, like a lot of terms, has no meaning besides what each individual subjectively projects onto it.

      • piloto_ciego 4 hours ago

        I agree, like the average human isn't generally intelligent.

        IMO, AGI is literally no different from ASI, though people think it is. Like, Imagine you have 1,000 generally intelligent humans working for you (which nobody is really) and you were to point them at your pet project. That would be amazing!

    • baal80spam 4 hours ago

      > We will now see the goalposts moved

      It's already happening :)

      • piloto_ciego 4 hours ago

        Hilariously it is, I'm just reading more on this!

  • yusufozkan 5 hours ago

    what the hell is that score/cost curve lol

    • minimaxir 5 hours ago

      DeepSeek v4 Flash recently had a similar "more reasoning is cheaper" curve. It's a fun counterintuition.

      • Frost1x 4 hours ago

        It’s not that different than a lot of real world economies. Often paying for someone or something with better quality can reduce total costs. You have less failures, less mistakes, so on, so while the expertise or quality of the product is higher than cheaper solutions, they can be more reliable and over time ultimately cheaper.

        The question I have is how far back that curve can go without relying on economies of scale to just drag all the points back to the left. And without overfitting a specific metric that I don’t need (like this test).

      • Phemist 4 hours ago

        What is the intuition. Higher quality turns due to more reasoning results in significantly fewer turns taken?

        • tedsanders 3 hours ago

          Yep. In particular, ARC-AGI-3 is a series of games where if you fail, you keep trying again (until eventually hitting a timeout). So the sooner you succeed, the sooner you stop spending tokens retrying. If it was a benchmark where everyone got one attempt with no retries, you wouldn't see it bend backward.

        • minimaxir 4 hours ago

          Yes, in theory.

  • bigbuppo 3 hours ago

    Wake me when it's going to spontaneously fix my leaky faucet because if it doesn't do it nobody else will. Until it has that capability I don't really care.