daniel kokotajlo

Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo

2026-09-17 — saved image

Daniel Kokotajlo [verified] @DKokotajlo · 2h
Another good essay from an OpenAI capabilities researcher I know (well, now former). I think focusing on control and abandoning alignment for now is is a reasonable strategy, but implementing it effectively will require an agreement not to RSI to ASI at max or close to max speed. Figuring out control is going to take time and money. Also, it only works up to a point, I think. In AI 2040 we talk about this.

[quoted tweet]
Oleg Mürk [verified] @oleg_murk · 4h
We don't know how to reliably align frontier AI models.

Alignment may get harder, not easier, as models become more capable....

ai controlalignmentrecursive self-improvementai 2040daniel kokotajlooleg murk

Jakub Pachocki @merettm

2026-09-02 — reply by @DKokotajlo — saved image

Jakub Pachocki [verified] @merettm · 12h

I want to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4.

OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique, as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution. I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it, and it's a core goal of our current research program.

224 replies   593 reposts   5.2K likes   1M views

[repost banner] Connor Axiotes reposted

Daniel Kokotajlo [verified]
@DKokotajlo

Thanks for speaking up on this and for keeping the depth low for now. I look forward to reading your deeper explanation. It seems to me (and I suspect you agree?) that monitorability is very important and we are now in something of a race to the bottom on it; even with depth low this is a worrying direction to be moving yes? And as the information article says, even if openai doesn't go further, others might... I urge you to make it your job to get some sort of industrywide monitorability standard set up, either to arrest the slide into oblivion or better yet to race to the top. I think this is something where we need more than just political will, we need thoughtful technical specifications. You can contribute greatly towards both.

8:05 AM · Sep 2, 2026 · 10K Views [partly covered by the navigation bar]

chain of thought monitorabilityopenaiastracomputation graph depthmonitorability standarddaniel kokotajlojakub pachocki

Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo

2026-08-27 — saved image

Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo · 17m
To everyone at Anthropic or OpenAI or Meta or xAI or GDM: I agree with Richard here and we are both speaking from years of experience, years of talking to people on the inside who justified their behavior using one or more of the following arguments, and whose justifications turned out to be incorrect for the reasons Richard described.

For those who don't know, Richard is a convert to this view. When he and I were at OpenAI together he was dismissive on people on the outside who said things like this. (For example, I remember him saying to me when I left that he was going to stay because, in part, it would give him access to the latest models during the intelligence explosion which would allow him to do better alignment research.) I say this because it makes his current opinion more credible. I have great respect for him for changing his mind, on this and on various other things.

[Quoted tweet]
Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo · Aug 25
Replying to @RichardMCNgo
You don't need to stay to do good research: work that aims to scale to much more intelligent systems can almost always be done on publicly-available models. (And nobody can think ... [cut off]

ai safetylab insidersalignment researchdaniel kokotajlorichard ngo

Eli Lifland @eli_lifland

2025-11-22

agi timelinesai 2027forecastingeli liflanddaniel kokotajlosingularityai safety