Why CoT interpretability was never a real audit trail — and what a stronger safety substrate looks like
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-03
Gary Marcus quotes the view that 'chain of thought interpretability was always going to be so fragile as to be an unacceptable backstop for long-term AI safety,' but calls kicking away the scaffolding insane. @williamtp explains the architectural root: learned machinery lives in weights and much runtime computation hides in activations, so CoT's visible words are never a complete record of what determined the answer. The stronger destination: trust-critical reasoning in an inspectable symbolic substrate, where the trace is the reasoning — directly relevant to OpenAI's moves reducing CoT monitorability.
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