Opinion: Recurrent Depth Models Don't Eliminate CoT, Just Shift Compute

xuanalogue · x · 2026-09-02

The author argues that the negative reaction to Astra's purported architecture (likely referring to recurrent depth/Looped Transformers) is overblown. This architecture has been known for years and doesn't eliminate Chain of Thought, but allows more computation within a forward pass. The author is more concerned about the reduced utility of CoT monitoring, likening it to the increased computation from stacking more layers.

Related event: OpenAI's Astra Reportedly Uses Recurrent Depth Architecture, Hiding Its Reasoning and Raising Safety Alarms(35 posts)→

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →