Real Alpha has cut 2 moments of Eric Bigelow (Member of Technical Staff, Goodfire) talking, from an interview on The Cognitive Revolution published Oct 10, 2026.
What Eric Bigelow said
Resampling every token shows where answers collapse
“there will be certain points in reasoning that the model was initially sort of at a 50% chance of this answer and 30% chance of this answer.”
Eric Bigelow7:55 Reasoning models enumerate options, then pick from the soup
Bigelow argues modern reasoning models fix the backtracking problem by listing every option, then choosing. He says reasoning is almost a misnomer for this.
The episode
The Cognitive RevolutionHow Agents Decide: Goodfire's Eric Bigelow on Critical Tokens, Phase Shifts, & In-Context Learning
Eric Bigelow · Researcher, Goodfire
6:30of 2:00:51 · Oct 10
