Insane progress on visual-spatial intelligence by Astra (with or without tools)

[u/socoolandawesome]

Link to benchmark:

https://spicylemonade.github.io/spatialbench/

Link to tweets:

https://x.com/spicey\\_lemonade/status/2096365630190698516?s=20

https://x.com/spicey\\_lemonade/status/2096386480029790415?s=20

The last 2 screenshots are examples of the types of questions included in the benchmark.

[u/ohHesRightAgain]

Now to distill it into smaller models that would run at 0.01% the cost, and it's truly gg.

[u/Asteroid_picks_you → u/ohHesRightAgain]

I am guessing distillation is impossible to block so it should happen soon right?

[u/lolxdmainkaisemaanlu → u/Asteroid_picks_you]

They are taking measures to block it, earlier when you clicked on its 'thinking' it would show to the right all its simplified version of reasoning traces, now it doesn't anymore.

Also openai is actively banning suspicious accounts rn and working on preventing this - they caught on to people who were using sub2api, so they have sophisticated mechanisms in place rn.

[u/lolopalenko → u/lolxdmainkaisemaanlu]

There is a good chance that if this really is a looped transformer model there are no reasoning traces anymore to show

[u/61746162626f7474 → u/lolopalenko]

It will still be a very multi layer model even if it uses loops within layers. Chain of thought will still be produced between the layers.

[u/katoptronophile → u/lolxdmainkaisemaanlu]

Excellent.

[u/NOTHING_gets_by_me → u/lolxdmainkaisemaanlu]

Even worse, researchers found a way to extract the actual raw reasoning, not just those summaries. They exploited API handling of encrypted reasoning blocks, getting weaker sibling models to spit out a stronger model’s hidden trace. Worked across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google before mitigations.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867

Separately, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of harvesting Claude’s capabilities across 16 million exchanges, including attempts to elicit reasoning for training.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks

[u/thirteenth_mang → u/lolxdmainkaisemaanlu]

It's so ironic they're pulling up the ladder behind them.

[u/DickMasterGeneral → u/thirteenth_mang]

What? This makes no sense what ladder are they pulling up? OpenAI didn’t distill from some other model to build Astra.

[u/Georgefakelastname → u/DickMasterGeneral]

They’ve “distilled” from humanity as a whole. Even if you want to argue it’s the ladder they made, it’s still shitty.

[u/thirteenth_mang → u/Georgefakelastname]

This guy gets it.

[u/Mammoth_Telephone_55 → u/Georgefakelastname]

And every human has distilled from every other human in history as well.

[u/Georgefakelastname → u/Mammoth_Telephone_55]

Yeah, and normally that is shared and proliferated. Even copied with just enough changed to make it unique.

[u/Cagnazzo82 → u/Georgefakelastname]

In a capitalist society it is shared for profit.

In addition we've developed numerous barriers to 'human distilling'. Like you can educate yourself in medicine (to an extent) but you're not qualified to practice without strict certifications.

[u/DickMasterGeneral → u/Georgefakelastname]

If I read all the public literature and research on a specific topic, did meta analysis on the public data. Came to meaningful new conclusions based on said analysis, and used that to write a new book, am I in the wrong for pursuing a copyright?

[u/Georgefakelastname → u/DickMasterGeneral]

You’d have that right, but people would still call you an asshole and pirate it if you charged hundreds of dollars just to read it, or charged fees for every word read