{"podcast":{"title":"LessWrong (Curated & Popular)","slug":"lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401","podcast_index_feed_id":5643401,"rss_url":"https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2037297.rss","website_url":"https://sites.libsyn.com/421877","image_url":"https://storage.buzzsprout.com/xq8g0aka74ttwoa9xkxlmy5fn9oa?.jpg","author":"LessWrong","episode_count":1002,"summary":"Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma. If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.","last_synced_at":"2026-09-28T08:23:50.844993+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401"},"episode":{"title":"\"Astra is much better at reasoning with filler tokens than previous models\" by Dylan Xu, SebastianP, Alek Westover","slug":"astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than-previous-models-by-dylan-xu-sebastianp-alek-westover","published_at":"2026-09-12T13:45:21+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than-previous-models-by-dylan-xu-sebastianp-alek-westover","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401","url":"https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19793932-astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than-previous-models-by-dylan-xu-sebastianp-alek-westover.mp3","audio_url":"https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19793932-astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than-previous-models-by-dylan-xu-sebastianp-alek-westover.mp3","summary":"We measure GPT-6-Astra's capabilities when its prompt is padded with a variable number of meaningless “filler” tokens (e.g., dots) and it is told to answer immediately without reasoning. On tasks designed to require lots of serial cognition, Astra performs significantly better with filler tokens than without (e.g., improving from ~10% to ~50% on 4-hop natural facts reasoning). On more general benchmarks, filler tokens also modestly improve Astra's performance (e.g., improving from ~60% to ~9...","meta_description":"We measure GPT-6-Astra's capabilities when its prompt is padded with a variable number of meaningless “filler” tokens (e.g., dots) and it is told to answe…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":933,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/episodes/astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than-previous-models-by-dylan-xu-sebastianp-alek-westover/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than-previous-models-by-dylan-xu-sebastianp-alek-westover.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}