Brockman: OpenAI hides chain of thought to preserve faithfulness and prevent distillation
Greg Brockman · Ai Goes Parabolic | OpenAI Co-Founder Greg Brockman · Apr 22, 2026 · at 40:43
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman explains the rationale behind hiding raw reasoning traces in reasoning models.
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“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, because you can really read the model's thoughts. You can see exactly how it got to an answer, so you can interpret How, like, what was actually motivating that answer? Now, the problem is, if you train the model to have a chain of thought that looks good, then you lose all the faithfulness, right? It's just going to be like, the model knows that part of the answer that is desired is for the chain of thought to look a certain way, and so it may not be representative of how it actually arrived at that answer anymore. And so we were, we made an early decision to say we want to avoid any temptation to train these chain of thoughts to look at Favorable to look like something you could present to a user, and so that really made us lean out for multiple reasons, for competitive reasons, for safety reasons, from the idea of showing these intermediate thoughts.”
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