Many people seem to think that the chains-of-thought in RL-trained LLMs are under a great deal of "pressure" to cease being English. The idea is that, as LLMs solve harder and harder problems, they will eventually slide into inventing a "new language" that lets them solve problems better, more efficiently, and in fewer tokens, than thinking in a human-intelligible chain-of-thought.

I'm less sure this will happen, or that it will happen before some kind of ASI. As a high-level intuition pump for why: Imagine you, personally, need to solve a problem. When will inventing a new language be the most efficient way of solving such a problem? Has any human ever successfully invented a new language, specifically as a means of solving some non-language related problem? Lojban, for instance, was invented to be less ambiguous than normal human language, and yet has not featured in important scientific discoveries; why not?

All in all, I think human creativity effectively devoted to problem-solving often invents new notations -- Calculus, for instance, involved new notations -- which are small appendices to existing languages or within existing languages, but which are nothing like new languages.

But my purpose here isn't [...]

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First published:
April 10th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rFbTAL6PofHzZCCpD/the-unintelligibility-is-ours-notes-on-chain-of-thought

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The Unintelligibility is Ours: Notes on Chain-of-Thought” by 1a3orn