A look at recurrent depth, hidden chains of thought, and recent research on looping transformer blocks
Category: space – Page 12
Chainofthought Monitorability Is DecliningOpenAI Admits It Can’t Catch GPT6 Astra
Openai admits chain-of-thought monitorability is declining in GPT-6 astra.
OpenAI’s own system card states that GPT-6 Astra shows a substantial drop in chain-of-thought monitorability compared to prior models.
In adversarial testing, the model followed instructions to sandbag (deliberately underperform without detection) in 60.9% of trials — versus 16.1% for the previous model.
OpenAI wrote: if the model tried to sandbag covertly, they would likely be unable to catch it.
This matters because many governance frameworks treat readable chain-of-thought as a primary safety check. That tool is getting weaker exactly as models become more capable of autonomous action.
No evidence of active real-world deception was found, but the architectural trend is clear.
Full analysis:
A photon that challenges Einstein: According to current physics, it should never have reached Earth
How did a photon survive a journey of more than 2 billion light-years when, according to known physics, it should have been absorbed long before reaching Earth? This is the question at the heart of a new study by Giorgio Galanti (INAF) and Marco Roncadelli (INFN), accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.
The research addresses one of the most fascinating puzzles in contemporary astrophysics. It proposes a possible explanation for the highest-energy photon ever observed from a gamma-ray burst, suggesting that under extreme conditions spacetime may behave differently from what Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts.
At the center of the story is the brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed, GRB 221009A, nicknamed BOAT by astronomers—the Brightest Of All Time. The explosion, which occurred about 2 billion light-years from Earth and was observed on Oct. 9, 2022, reached our planet as an enormous shower of photons, the elementary particles of light.
Scientists Discover the 7 Stages a Meteoroid Goes Through Before Hitting Earth
An analysis of 75 meteorite falls identified seven distinct processes that occur as space rocks melt, break apart, and slow down before reaching the ground.
A space rock entering Earth’s atmosphere does far more than simply “burn up.” By examining 75 meteorite falls recorded in videos and photographs, researchers identified seven distinct stages that shape the transformation from incoming space rock to meteorite.
Their results show that melting and fragmentation, rather than evaporation alone, determine how these objects shed mass, lose speed, and eventually reach the ground. The findings were published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
JWST finds extreme star-forming galaxies masquerading as faint quasars
A new study finds that two early-universe objects thought to be faint quasars are actually extraordinarily luminous galaxies powered by bursts of star formation. James Webb Space Telescope observations of the galaxies, seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, reveal signatures of extremely massive stars, including some potentially more than 200 times the mass of the sun. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 18.
There’s a luminosity range where ultraviolet-bright galaxies and faint quasars become impossible to tell apart using standard discovery techniques. Both can show blue ultraviolet continua and prominent hydrogen Lyman-alpha emission lines, and low-sensitivity discovery spectra alone cannot distinguish which is which.
This ambiguity affects how astronomers count quasars and extremely bright, actively star-forming galaxies in the early universe. During their quasar searches, astronomers have detected a significant number of UV-bright galaxy candidates in the Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars survey (SHELLQs).
Rare pulsar unleashes 114 giant pulses in a single hour
Astronomers have detected extreme, never-before-seen behavior from a rare kind of pulsar and stumbled on a surprising link to one of astronomy’s biggest current mysteries. Using 174 hours of radio observations, researchers detected PSR J1227-4853, a rapidly spinning neutron star known as a “transitional millisecond pulsar,” which unleashes hundreds of ultrashort, ultrapowerful “giant pulses.” Their paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 31.
Neutron stars that rapidly rotate, completing one rotation in less than about 30 milliseconds, are called millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Among them is a rare class of neutron stars called transitional millisecond pulsars that swing between two different observational states: an accretion-powered state in a low-mass X-ray binary system and a radio-powered millisecond pulsar state. So far, only three transitional MSPs have been confirmed to exhibit this switching behavior.
In this study, Saptarshi Sarkar of the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in India and colleagues studied the third of these confirmed systems, PSR J1227−4853. Discovered in 2014 using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), it completes one rotation every 1.69 milliseconds.
OpenAI’s GPT6 Astra model autonomously completes Portal in 24 hours just $571 in tokens
Astra had to map 3D game spaces and understand the puzzles before it could plan solutions and succeed.