20T-Parameter Models May Develop Unintelligible Reasoning Traces
scaling01 · x · 2026-08-11
The author predicts that when OpenAI's model parameters reach the 10T or 20T scale, their chain-of-thought (CoT) might evolve into almost completely unintelligible "neuralese".
As models scale, much of the reasoning will happen implicitly internally. Simply monitoring surface-level CoT will not be scalable and will require extra effort to maintain faithfulness and readability, making Mechanistic Interpretability (mech interp) critically important.
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