What are people misunderstanding?

That Astra is just using the same methods as humans do (like abliteration) for modifying the behavior of a model, and that there is no particular connection to Astra itself being a model.

That's fair, but almost everything so far that models can do much faster and deeper than humans can have been by using the same methods that humans do. For example, with cybersecurity, human researchers could if given enough time find every exploit that allowed the OAI models to escape the sandbox via Artifactory RCE and breach Hugging Face. But still there is a step change in what's possible by doing this at an industrial scale and stringing together all the solutions. The implications of applying existing mech interp capabilities this way could be very significant.