{
  "video_id": "reddit_1w51wt0",
  "channel_slug": "singularity",
  "channel_handle": "r/singularity",
  "title": "OpenAl's chief scientist on the neuralese controversy",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1w51wt0/openals_chief_scientist_on_the_neuralese/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260902",
  "published_at": "2026-09-02T06:05:41+00:00",
  "transcript": "\"I want to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4.\n\nOpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique, as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution. I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it, and it's a core goal of our current research program.\"\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[54 upvotes] For the uninitiated, here is the AI explanation of what is going on: \n\n>Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, is saying:\n\n>“**Astra is not secretly doing enormous amounts of recursive hidden thinking.**”\n\n>His most important sentence is:\n\n>**\"The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4.”**\n\n>In plain English: **even if Astra uses recurrent/looping techniques, the amount of sequential neural computation inside a forward pass is not orders of magnitude deeper than GPT-4. **Think roughly “same general ballpark, at most around 2×,” rather than something looping 50 or 100 times until it solves a problem.\n\n>He is specifically worried that sensational reporting could create this dynamic:\n“**OpenAI has hidden neuralese → competitors think OpenAI has a huge advantage → competitors deliberately abandon visible chain-of-thought → everyone races toward models whose reasoning humans cannot monitor.**”\nHe wants to prevent that.\n\n>This substantially weakens the Kokotajlo “holy shit, neuralese has arrived” interpretation.\n\n....\n\n>But notice something important.\n\n>Pachocki **does not say the monitorability problem is fa\n\n[52 upvotes] Imagine if AI safety community interpreted the \"leak\" in such a way that caused some labs (like China or xAI) to race to the bottom with Neuralese due to a misunderstanding xd\n\nEdit: Someone else from OpenAI safety team https://x.com/tomekkorbak/status/2095031132781961346\n\n> i think the day when a frontier lab trains a frontier-scale recurrent (or otherwise unmonitorable) language model would be one of the darkest in the current AI era. this day is not today and i would love frontier labs to coordinate on a commitment that it never comes.",
  "transcript_chars": 2504,
  "ingested_at": "2026-09-02T13:30:19.891585+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 134,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.93,
    "num_comments": 48,
    "author": "Ok_Display_3159",
    "is_self": true
  }
}