“What is neuralese and why is it bad?” by Linch
“What is neuralese and why is it bad?” by Linch  
Podcast: LessWrong (30+ Karma)
Published On: Thu Sep 03 2026
Description: What is neuralese? To explain neuralese, we need to first understand chain-of-thought, one of the largest developments in AI in the last five years. Right now AIs think broadly but shallowly in a single forward pass. The model gives you an immediate snap answer to a question you might be interested in. They can be pretty smart in their snap answers,, but mostly they can’t do very advanced reasoning tasks like complicated math or programming: .The solution that the frontier AI companies have come up with is called chain-of-thought. Basically the model runs one forward pass, writes down some intermediate thoughts in natural language in a journal, and then that's fed back into the model to run another pass. This loop is repeated until the model is somewhat confident it has the right answer (or it hits a cap on thinking time), and then it outputs the user-visible results (for example a chatbot's response to your question, or working code). The looping step is often called “recurrence.” Natural-language chain-of-thought is a major advance in letting models reason for longer, but it also has an accidental safety benefit. Using natural language as a key recurrence step for a [...] ---Outline:(00:10) What is neuralese?(03:25) Why is it bad?(04:48) Is it in use today?(06:07) Appendix A: OpenAI's response(06:58) Total number of serial steps low(07:59) Chain-of-thought monitoring isn't a perfect or long term solution anyway(09:28) Aren't you afraid of manifesting the bad thing? The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 2nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RCYF2rW8wgusidZk7/what-is-neuralese-and-why-is-it-bad --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.