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Scott Alexander quote, Sep 24, 2026

Author, Astral Codex Ten · Sep 24, 2026 · Post, The Specter Of Neuralese

For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

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It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post
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So I was like, “I don’t think we’re going to get it in 2026, probably not in 2027, maybe in 2028.” So it did happen a lot faster than I expected.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
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If I was in charge of an alignment or interpretability team I would never run out of experiments to run and things to try, including having the time to properly talk to the models in the first place.Zvi MowshowitzSep 14, 2026· Post
Over the summer there was a step change, as Mythos and Astra started kicking off the early stages of recursive self-improvement (RSI).Zvi MowshowitzSep 14, 2026· Post
About this quote
Said by
Scott Alexander, Author, Astral Codex Ten
Where
The Specter Of Neuralese
Topics
Research
Source
astralcodexten.com/p/the-specter-of-neuralese

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