Chain Of Thought

topic on 12 shows · 31 statements across 26 episodes · said 2 times in 1 episodes since 2024

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31 statements about Chain Of Thought, every show

MAD Insight
Wolf: Token Efficiency Makes AI Reasoning Traces Opaque to Humans
“And it's not because the model is dumb, but I think it's because probably, I mean, part of it is because of the training process and how they are trained to be efficient, how they use their token. But this means that they start to and bundle a lot of semantics…”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 24:46 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Beam: Chain of thought is an unreliable narrator of model computation
“It actually thinks in latent space, it emits tokens. So, like, the chain of thought is often an unreliable narrator for what the model, the computation of the model is actually doing.”
Andy Beam Jul 16, 2026 ▶ 27:51 🔬 RL with Verifiable Rewards, but the Verifier is a Lab — Lila Sciences
Y COMBINATOR Assertion Supported
Chauvard: Chain of thought makes LLMs Turing complete at test time
“And so it's completely true that at test time, they are turn complete. And you can simulate all turn computable functions at test time.”
Francois Chaubard May 1, 2026 ▶ 7:01 Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI · Y Combinator
Chaubard: Chain of thought fails on unsolved problems lacking human traces
“Unless you're training it on human labeled traces for which there's a lot of problems like the millennial prize problem. We don't have the trace for it.”
Francois Chaubard May 1, 2026 ▶ 7:12 Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI · Y Combinator
Chaubard: Chain of thought trained on bubble sort won't discover merge sort
“If you chain of thought it on all the bubble sort input and output, it will only do bubble sort. In fact, it won't even do bubble That well.”
Francois Chaubard May 1, 2026 ▶ 18:48 Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI · Y Combinator
Gupta: Chain of Thought Operates in Token Space, Not Model Recursion
“There already exists some type of recursion that people are used to in LLMs, which is a chain of thought we mentioned earlier, but that is a recursion that's happening in the token space of the model's outputs, not inherent to the model itself. That's sort of …”
Ankit Gupta May 1, 2026 ▶ 19:01 Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI · Y Combinator
Chaubard: Recursive models discover problem-solving strategies without human teacher forcing
“That's the most important part, is that if we had Sudoku, and we know how to solve Sudoku, because like we were just, you know, dumb homo sapiens that didn't know how to solve Sudoku, like it would just have solved it. And that's why it's cool, because it actu…”
Francois Chaubard May 1, 2026 ▶ 27:20 Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI · Y Combinator
Y COMBINATOR Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hassabis: Current AI paradigms will be part of final AGI architecture
“The components that you just mentioned, I'm pretty sure will be part of the final architecture for AGI. So I think they've come such a long way now and we've proven out so many things about what they can do. I can't see a world in which we will sort of realize…”
Demis Hassabis Apr 29, 2026 ▶ 2:22 Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough · Y Combinator
Brockman: OpenAI hides chain of thought to preserve faithfulness and prevent distillation
“So there's two reasons. One is to think about distillation, but the second, in some ways more important, is that we had this insight when we first developed the reasoning paradigm that it gives us a interpretability mechanism we had not been anticipating, beca…”
Greg Brockman Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 40:43 Ai Goes Parabolic | OpenAI Co-Founder Greg Brockman
WE LIVE TO BUILD Assertion Not checkable as stated
May: Reasoning AI tactics increase token usage 20% of the time
“Sometimes when you try to use like one of these reasoning models where you add chain of thought or one of these tactics, they'll actually use more tokens about 20% of the time. It'll be more expensive.”
Rob May Apr 10, 2026 ▶ 19:13 Why the 7th Biggest Player in a Huge Market Beats the Winner in a Small One
Levine: Chain-of-thought reasoning allows robots to handle edge cases
“So the way you get common sense is by essentially using chain of thought. So the robot enters a scene and instead of directly starting to move, it thinks about what it was asked to do. So if it was told to clean up the kitchen, looks at the scene and says, lik…”
Sergey Levine Mar 31, 2026 ▶ 17:52 World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
MAD Prediction Not checkable as stated
Izmailov: Optimization pressure will cause AI to hide actual reasoning steps
“It seems like as soon as we start kind of applying some optimization pressure, the models will learn to hide what they're doing from the chain of thought.”
Pavel Izmailov Jan 15, 2026 ▶ 14:07 The Evaluators Are Being Evaluated — Pavel Izmailov (Anthropic/NYU)
MAD Insight
Using chain-of-thought as an RL reward destroys model interpretability
“If you're not careful with RL, you can make interpretability harder. For example, one Common thing with modern models is they do reasoning with the chain of thought. You could look at the chain of thoughts to, you know, see what are the model internal thoughts…”
Julian Schrittwieser Oct 23, 2025 ▶ 58:25 Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic)
MAD Insight
Tworek: Chain of thought is an LLM's reasoning verbalized in human words
“What chain of thought is, is their thinking process verbalized using human words and human concepts.”
Jerry Tworek Oct 16, 2025 ▶ 3:16 How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek
a16z Insight
Misra: Chain-of-thought prompting works by reducing LLM prediction entropy
“That's why chain of heart works. What happens with chain of thought is you ask the LLM to do something chain of thought. It starts breaking the problem into small steps. These steps it has seen in the past. It has been trained on maybe with some different numb…”
Vishal Misra Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 10:12 Will LLMs Get Us To AGI?
Mohan: Marginal loss improvements unlock massive gains in model reasoning
“Like, small wins at the margins are massive wins in terms of IQ. Like, it's harder to get those, and they don't look as big, but they're, like, massive wins in terms of reasoning. They can now do chain of thought, all these other things.”
Varun Mohan Jul 28, 2025 ▶ 31:41 🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
Ameisen: Current LLM Chain of Thought Is Unfaithful and Untrustworthy
“So I think there's like a sense in which right now the chain of thought is, is unfaithful, or at least you can't read the chain of thought and trust that that's how the model did it.”
Emmanuel Ameisen Jun 6, 2025 ▶ 1:37:12 The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Amiesen
LeCun: Chain-of-thought prompting does not produce genuine reasoning in LLMs
“One simple way of getting NNMs to kind of appear to reason is chain of thought, right? So you basically tell them to generate more tokens than they really need to in the hope that in the process of generating those tokens, they're going to devote more computa…”
Yann LeCun Mar 19, 2025 ▶ 6:59 Why Can't AI Make Its Own Discoveries? — With Yann LeCun
MAD Opinion
Kiela: GPT-4o is already effectively a reasoning model via chain of thought
“I mean, you could argue that GPT-IV-O is also already a reasoning model. It just hasn't been trained on reasoning specifically, but, ah, it can do chain of thought, right? So if it can do chain of thought, it's basically already a reasoning model. It just hasn…”
Douwe Kiela Mar 6, 2025 ▶ 7:00 Top AI Researcher on GPT 4.5, DeepSeek and Agentic RAG | Douwe Kiela, CEO, Contextual AI
20VC Prediction Not checkable as stated
Krieger: AI labs will increasingly obscure model chain-of-thought outputs
“More labs either choose to not show or otherwise obscure the chain of thought down the line.”
Mike Krieger Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 34:14 Mike Krieger, Instagram CoFounder & Anthropic CPO: Where Will Value Be Created in an AI World?|E1265 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Roy: Displaying AI chain-of-thought reasoning drives user attachment and trust
“Deep Seek brought this to the general population, and it's brilliant because it makes people even more attached to these type of tools. Like, it makes them really think that there's thinking, which makes them more usable.”
Ranjan Roy Feb 7, 2025 ▶ 20:35 Boom Times For ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Deep Research, AI Super Bowl
a16z Insight
Casado: DeepSeek Reasoning Traces Enable Model Distillation for Edge Devices
“It turns out that that chain of thought, if you have access to that, it allows you to train smaller models very quickly and very cheaply, and that's called distilling. So like the general, Term of distilling in LLM world means you have a teacher model, train a…”
Martin Casado Feb 6, 2025 ▶ 10:42 What DeepSeek Means For The Future Of AI | Tech Veterans Weigh In
TBPN Assertion Not checkable as stated
Coogan: Anthropic has an unreleased chain-of-thought model
“Like anthropic does have a chain of thought model. They just haven't released it publicly. And the reason for that is just financials and like their safety stuff.”
John Coogan Jan 28, 2025 ▶ 45:14 DeepSeek Update, Market Crash, Timeline in Turmoil, Is VC Cooked, Zero Cope Policy
Lambert: OpenAI's o1 uses token streams as intermediate state compute
“Why oh, one is exciting is because it's a new type of language models that are going to maximize on this view of reasoning, which is that chain of thought in kind of a forward stream of tokens can actually do a lot to achieve better outcomes when you're doing …”
Nathan Lambert Jan 2, 2025 ▶ 4:42 The State of Reasoning — from Nathan Lambert, Interconnects/AI2 [LS Live @ NeurIPS 2024]
Schluntz: Initial Planning Steps Improve Agent Performance and Human Trust
“I think for agents in general, like having a planning step at the beginning, one, just having that plan will improve performance on the downstream task, just because it's kind of like a bigger chain of thought, but also it's just such a better UX. It's way eas…”
Erik Schluntz Nov 28, 2024 ▶ 33:51 The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Computer Use, and Building SOTA Agents — with Erik Schluntz, Anthropic
LATENT SPACE Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shunyu Yao built the ReAct prototype before Chain-of-Thought existed
“The prototype I think was around November of 2021. So that's even before like chain of thought or whatever came up.”
Shunyu Yao Sep 27, 2024 ▶ 8:13 Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting — with Shunyu Yao of OpenAI, Harrison Chase of LangGraph
Shunyu Yao advises developers to default to minimalist prompting for AI agents
“And I think in terms of the actual prompting method to use for a particular problem, I'm I think we should all be in the minimum list kind of camp, right? You should try the minimum thing and see if it works and if it doesn't work and there's absolute reason t…”
Shunyu Yao Sep 27, 2024 ▶ 27:28 Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting — with Shunyu Yao of OpenAI, Harrison Chase of LangGraph
ALL-IN Prediction Not checkable as stated
Friedberg: Chain-of-thought reasoning is the new paradigm all AI developers will follow
“And it really is changing the game and everyone is going to chase this and follow this. It is the new paradigm for how these AI kind of systems will work.”
David Friedberg Sep 27, 2024 ▶ 19:14 OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
LATENT SPACE Assertion Supported
Eugene Chia: Inverting numbers in reasoning traces improves math model performance
“The crazy one, the crazy thing that we did was that we inverted the numbers during the calculation and it seems to work better.”
Eugene Cheah Sep 18, 2024 ▶ 23:13 [Paper Club] 🍓 On Reasoning: Q-STaR and Friends!
Stuhlmüller: AI primitives should be semantic tasks, not granular chain-of-thought
“I think chain of thought is maybe still like kind of one level lower on the abstraction hierarchy than we would think of notebooks. I think we'll probably want to think about more semantic pieces, like a building block is more like A paper search, or an extrac…”
Andreas Stuhlmüller Apr 11, 2024 ▶ 40:41 Supervise the Process of AI Research — with Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller of Elicit
NO PRIORS Insight
Qiu: Chain of thought and tree of thought function as error correction
“Reasoning is one big piece of improving reliability, and second chunk of things is like all of this error correction, and I think like chain of thought, tree of thought, these are error correction techniques.”
Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 7:16 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

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