Preserving plaintext CoTs will look like an alchemical era of observability, argues loop transformer architect

bookwormengr · x · 2026-09-11

tszzl, architect of the loop transformer, argues that the current effort to preserve plaintext chain-of-thought as a form of observability will one day look like an alchemical era — we could do much better by understanding the model's alien ontology from the ground up. A reply quips the message to OpenAI's security folks as "no CoT, no distillation," highlighting the tension between CoT monitoring and distillation.

Related event: Plain-Text CoT Called 'Alchemy-Era' Observability as Compressed Activations Emerge(4 posts)→

Original post →

More from AGI Musings

AGI Musings channel →