I suspect that one reason why OpenAI doesn’t expose all the thinking of O1 is that this thinking would upset some users, especially journalists and such. It’s hard enough making sure that the final outputs are sufficiently unobjectionable to go public at a large scale. It seems harder to make sure the full set of steps is also unobjectionable.
I suspect the same thing, they almost come right out and say it: (emphasis mine)
We believe that a hidden chain of thought presents a unique opportunity for monitoring models. Assuming it is faithful and legible, the hidden chain of thought allows us to “read the mind” of the model and understand its thought process. For example, in the future we may wish to monitor the chain of thought for signs of manipulating the user. However, for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cannot train any policy compliance or user preferences onto the chain of thought. We also do not want to make an unaligned chain of thought directly visible to users.
Therefore, after weighing multiple factors including user experience, competitive advantage, and the option to pursue the chain of thought monitoring, we have decided not to show the raw chains of thought to users.
I think this is a bad reason to hide the CoT from users. I am not particularly sympathetic to your argument, which amounts to ‘the public might pressure them to train away the inconvenient thoughts, so they shouldn’t let the public see the inconvenient thoughts in the first place.’ I think the benefits of letting the public see the CoT are pretty huge, but even if they were minor, it would be kinda patronizing and an abuse of power to hide them preemptively.
Thanks!
I suspect the same thing, they almost come right out and say it: (emphasis mine)
I think this is a bad reason to hide the CoT from users. I am not particularly sympathetic to your argument, which amounts to ‘the public might pressure them to train away the inconvenient thoughts, so they shouldn’t let the public see the inconvenient thoughts in the first place.’ I think the benefits of letting the public see the CoT are pretty huge, but even if they were minor, it would be kinda patronizing and an abuse of power to hide them preemptively.