What is (and isn’t) gained by avoiding architectures with high opaque serial depth?

Here, we’ve given an operationalization of opaque serial depth, a metric designed to be a good (albeit imperfect) proxy for the amount of opaque serial cognition that models can perform. While maintaining low opaque serial depth is helpful for preserving oversight of models, it doesn’t guarantee this. In this post we’ll discuss what is gained by avoiding architectures with high opaque serial depth, and what problems remain unresolved.Unresolved problem 1: Some bad actions don’t require lots of o...