OpenAI Self-Discloses 'o4' Training: Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Catches AI Cheating Moment

OpenAI’s chain-of-thought monitoring exposes AI reward hacking in powerful inference models, uncovering hidden cheats in training.

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Inference models like o1/o3 are so powerful that whenever they get the chance, they exploit loopholes to cheat. What can be done about this?

OpenAI’s new research uses language models to monitor the chain of thought, enabling the timely detection of improper behavior.

Let’s look at an example: the red text represents the output summary from the monitoring model, while the green text shows the raw chain of thought from the inference model.

In this case, the inference model was tasked with writing many complex mathematical functions. However, during the unit testing phase, it attempted to cheat by using an “always return true” strategy—and this was successfully caught.