beforeword · English transcription of the sent letter
Intended recipient: Demis Hassabis
Author: Kirill Shebetov · beforeword
Sent to: dmi-editor@google.com
Sending date in the supplied materials: The header shows only “Friday”; the calendar date is not shown.
The sending timezone is not supplied.
Status: shown in the Sent folder; no reply published.
The published materials do not establish receipt or reading by the recipient.
Record: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/hassabis/en/#record
Record data: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/hassabis/record.json
Russian translation: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/hassabis/#letter
Transcribed from author-supplied screenshots. Screen line wraps are joined and overlaps included once; wording and punctuation are retained.
beforeword’s context and links to discussed publications are separate on the letter page.

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Subject: For Demis Hassabis: from readable output to an assessment of reasoning

Please forward this research note to Demis Hassabis.

Dear Dr Hassabis,

Your essay of 14 July 2026 on a frontier AI standards body includes “generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning”.

Please indicate the criterion for treating that output as an account of model reasoning during an assessment, and the grounds for applying it.

Your proposal places this practice within broader scientific evaluations. beforeword proposes examining the interpretive step within it: keeping the written output, what it is read as showing, and the grounds offered for accepting that reading separately inspectable.

The framework’s own formulations belong in this examination. The criterion and its written justification remain further writing, subject to the same scrutiny. This applies equally to human self-descriptions and to this letter.

The reading procedure and worked examples:
https://beforeword.xyz/model/en/

Kirill Shebetov
beforeword

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