Transparency about the opaque serial depth is great, but this statement is consistent with Astra having a configurable "dial" that is currently set to a low depth but could be trivially increased.
We need more info to see how concerning these architectural changes are,
I want to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4.
OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since