# "Can activation verbalizers surface an internal chain of thought?" by oakhu, ryan_greenblatt

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/can-activation-verbalizers-surface-an-internal-chain-of-thought-by-oakhu-ryan-greenblatt
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/can-activation-verbalizers-surface-an-internal-chain-of-thought-by-oakhu-ryan-greenblatt.md
Podcast: [LessWrong (Curated & Popular)](https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401)
Published: 2026-06-22T06:58:17+00:00
Episode link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19382397-can-activation-verbalizers-surface-an-internal-chain-of-thought-by-oakhu-ryan_greenblatt.mp3
Audio file: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19382397-can-activation-verbalizers-surface-an-internal-chain-of-thought-by-oakhu-ryan_greenblatt.mp3
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Duration seconds: 4778

## Resource

We introduce an evaluation for activation verbalizers: can they surface a target model's reasoning as it solves a math problem in a single forward pass? For open-weight NLAs, the answer seems to be: "possibly, but definitely not reliably". Lots of important capabilities currently require AI models to reason "out loud" in a natural-language chain of thought, which means that we can monitor important parts of their thinking. It would be nice to have this same affordance for the reasoning tha...

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