Has GPT Astra degraded since release ?
I ran the "Ana de Armas" portrait as SVG on GPT Astra x-high - comparing it with Astra from release day and the Qwen3.8-27B open source model.
There is a degradation but it's subtle:
* The hairline was flawless, and is now flawed a little.
* The eyes were well proportioned but now look a little less realistic.
* The face was awesome, now it is elongated.
* The earrings were perfectly placed, now they are a bit off.
* Release-Astra played with shadows, Now-Astra doesn't
Astra today looks to me like a high quality quantization, or kv-quantization. It's very close to before, just not really there - and always worse, not better.
Qwen 3.8 is still amazing, it beats every other model except for Astra and Fable 5 in this test. And Qwen is not that far away from them.
I tested this with other models, including Gemini, SOL and more - none of them are even close to those 3.
Photo included only as reference, the AI models did not see the photo.