Hiding chain-of-thought mostly saves tokens and can worsen hallucinations, argues researcher

gerardsans · x · 2026-09-08

Replying to the claim that OpenAI's chief scientist said chain-of-thought was hidden mainly to protect it from supervision pressure, gerardsans argues the math shows little difference besides emitting fewer tokens—and in some cases it's worse: hardened trajectories worsen hallucinations and context rot in sparse or out-of-distribution regimes.

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