Comment by program_whiz
19 hours ago
Actually, removing CoT might make models safer, because we can analyze the entire landscape of their potential outputs, rather than a point-sample (we'll never know how close we were to "kill all humans"). By inspecting intermediate vector spaces, we can actually get certainty bounds on how safely the model is behaving (or even trending).
Wrote about it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-214402969
I don't see why you have to remove CoT to do that?
Good point, you don't have to -- but my argument is just that removing CoT doesn't make things less safe. Anything CoT can tell you is just a point sample of a probability surface. Having the whole probability surface can already answer any question the point sample can answer (for example, how likely is the model to produce a problematic phrase). While its more computationally expensive, you could always just draw point samples like the model does and evaluate those (or use temperature zero to just sample the most likely output tokens).