As someone who used to use Gemini a lot, if you are predominantly using Gemini you don't know what the current state of things is like
Other than that I'd look at some of the more unique benchmarks for astra, like playing factorio or using blender. It's an entirely different beast.
By the time we can show you data that convinces you that it does work, the next generation would already be out & incrementally dismantling the old conjectures that were true in the previous generations.
You're fundamentally asking for a violation of how information passively disseminates amongst humans: To go any faster requires more effort on the receiver's part to move up on the adoption curve.
It doesn't matter what comes tomorrow, with the next generation, if the claims now can't be proven.
To preempt the response: The math proof, regardless of them using non-disclosed user data or not, they spent $30M do do something closer to a 1000 monkeys approach, rather than a singular inference being very intelligent.
I agree with the meat of your statement, but am very interested in the pre-emption, "they spent $30M do do something closer to a 1000 monkeys approach, rather than a singular inference being very intelligent". First, I think the $30M number is inflated -- that's what the general public would have paid, but presumably the internal cost is lower, perhaps it's more like $10M. But it is still expensive. Second, I'm curious if it's really the case that they did a 1000-monkeys approach? I haven't read much in-depth reporting about the proof, so it's totally possible I just don't know. What is it that they did which is more like 1000-monkeys? Also, I wonder if that distinction matters -- if 1000 monkeys can reliably make ground breaking proofs, and the approach generalizes to other tasks, I will happily become a circus owner. Maybe you're claiming that it won't yield other proofs? Or the proofs are too opaque to be useful to humans? Or it can handle proofs but not other tasks?
Yes, a proof is a proof regardless how you get there. We however don't hear about when they fail, and I doubt their 10000 agents (from their own statement) would necessarily reach another solution/proof (this by leaning towards using user data after finding out others were close). They could as well have attacked another Millenium problem, but they didn't. In whichever case, we will have to wait and see if they (either company) can reach novel solutions/proofs without significant amount of human provided data for the LLM to bridge the gaps.
Further, and this is more of a policy opinion/prediction: If the numerable obtainable (albeit very hard) problems are solved, assuming training data is needed, will it push out future researchers from entering the field due to lack of reachable goals, thus cutting off future training data? LLMs have been great at replacing gateway jobs. But those jobs are what leads to frontier training data (be it maths, physics, chemistry, economics, graphics, prose, etc).
It's so abysmally bad on Google search... and it's free. Isn't Google the great pioneer of the product is us?