Nicholas Andresen

How AI is Learning to Think in Secret by Nicholas Andresen Published on January 6, 2026 On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning In September 2025, researchers published the internal monologue of OpenAI's GPT-03 as it decided to lie about scientific data.

This is what it thought.

There's an image here.

Description

Pardon?

This looks like someone had a stroke during a meeting they didn't want to be in, but their hand kept taking notes.

That transcript comes from a recent paper published by researchers at Apollo Research and OpenAI on catching AI system scheming.

To understand what's happening here, and why one of the most sophisticated AI systems in the world is babbling about synergy-customizing illusions, it first helps to know how we ended up being able to read AI thinking in the first place.

That story starts, of all places, on 4chan.

In late 2020, anonymous posters on 4chan started describing a prompting trick that would change the course of AI development.

It was almost embarrassingly simple.

Instead of just asking GPT-3 for an answer, ask it instead to show its work before giving its final answer.

Suddenly, it started solving math problems that had stumped it moments before.

To see why, try multiplying 8734 by 6892 in your head.

If you're like me, you start fine.

8734 times 2 is 17468.

Then you need to hold on to that while computing 8734 by 90, which is, let's see, 9 times.

4 is 36.

Carry the 3.

Wait, what was that first number?