OpenAI's chief scientist on neuralese: frontier models' computation graph depth within 2x of GPT-4
Ok_Display_3159 · reddit · 2026-09-02
OpenAI's chief scientist has responded to the "neuralese" controversy, saying he wants to prevent "a race into unmonitorability" kicked off by confused reporting.
Key facts: the depth of the computation graph for current frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4. He says OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since its very first reasoning models, as it provides a view into how alignment generalizes from the training distribution. However, he admits the technique is fragile and trending in a negative direction for reasons not contingent on architecture changes, which he plans to write about soon. Strengthening CoT monitoring is a core goal of OpenAI's current research program.
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