Astra’s hidden reasoning is far deeper than its visible output
Astra appears to perform substantially more reasoning than its answer reveals: it gets 8.6 times better odds than Fable 5.1 on no-chain-of-thought reasoning tasks, and completes roughly 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in one forward pass versus 4.1 for the next-best model. That is useful for latency and token costs, but it also makes the model’s reasoning harder to inspect, audit, and steer. The result is an early warning for safety methods built around readable chains of thought.