If you give an AI an inner monologue, it apparently starts teaching itself to be smarter. In a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper researchers from Stanford and a group calling itself "Notbad AI" have teamed up to create an AI model that pauses to "think" before spitting out answers, shows its work, and asks users to tell it which response is most correct. The team behind the Quiet Self-Taught Reasoner, or Quiet-STaR for short, wanted their model to not only be able to teach itself to reason — which they achieved in 2022 with the original Self-Taught Reasoner algorithm — but also to do so "quietly" before providing answers to prompts, thus operating like a human's inner monologue that, ideally, runs before we speak.
