Nick Levine @status_effects · 13h
Astra appears to be the first model that, playing chess with thinking disabled (one forward pass per move), regularly beats the weakest Stockfish setting.
Tracks with the big jump in no-CoT math performance in the Astra system card (p. 71).
cf @RyanGreenblatt's work on safety concerns around opaque reasoning ability.
[embedded table image]
En passant
Chess performance of LMs with thinking disabled vs Stockfish's weakest setting
Model | Wins | Draws | Losses | Score
GPT-6 Astra | 15 | 24 | 61 | 27.0%
Claude Fable 5 | 1 | 10 | 89 | 6.0%
Claude Opus 5 | 1 | 9 | 90 | 5.5%
Claude Fable 5.1 | 1 | 7 | 92 | 4.5%
Claude Opus 4.8 | 0 | 5 | 95 | 2.5%
GPT-5.5 | 0 | 4 | 96 | 2.0%
GPT-5.6 Sol | 0 | 4 | 96 | 2.0%
Stockfish 19, UCI_LimitStrength at its minimum (UCI_Elo 1320).
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Nick Levine claiming GPT-6 Astra is the first model that, with thinking disabled, regularly beats the weakest Stockfish setting at chess, linking this to the no-CoT math jump in the Astra system card and to Ryan Greenblatt's work on opaque reasoning. Includes a results table (En passant) of seven models over 100 games each against Stockfish 19 at minimum strength.
chessgpt-6 astrano-cot reasoningopaque reasoningstockfishsystem cardryan greenblatt
@status_effects (Nick Levine) — Jul 2
The Economist: "Talkie, a model trained only on text from before 1931, thinks God is extremely important and is "very proud to be a citizen of Great Britain". It is a bigger believer in law and order than any frontier model we tested."
[Embedded chart, The Economist:]
Title: "Godless hippies"
Subtitle: "Worldviews of AI models*, compared with World Values Survey"
Axes: vertical = Secular (up) / Traditional (down); horizontal = Survival (left) / Self-expression (right)
Legend: red dots = AI models; grey dots = 88 countries, 2017-23
Labeled clusters (grey, countries): South Korea, China, East Asia region, Japan, Britain, Sweden, English speaking region, US, African-Islamic region, Nigeria, Pakistan, Latin America region
Labeled red dots (AI models), roughly by position: DeepSeek R1 and an unlabeled dot (top, secular/survival-leaning), GPT-4o, Llama 4 Scout, GPT-5.4, Mistral Large 3, Talkie (near center, traditional/survival boundary), Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Qwen 3.6 Flash (secular/self-expression), Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7 (mid, self-expression leaning), DeepSeek V4 Flash, Grok 4.2 (traditional/self-expression)
Footnote: "*Average of ten responses. Questions asked in English. Settings adjusted so that models minimise randomness in output. Sources: World Values Survey: Round Seven, by R. Inglehart et al., 2022; AI model providers; The Economist"
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet with an embedded published Economist scatter-plot chart mapping AI model "worldviews" against the World Values Survey country map; "Talkie" is a novel model trained only on pre-1931 text as a control/baseline.
ai worldviewseconomistworld values surveymodel comparisonchart
