LLM's aren't humans and there's no reason to expect their "thinking"[1] to behave exactly - or even much - like human thinking. In particular, they don't need t

LLM's aren't humans and there's no reason to expect their "thinking"[1] to behave exactly - or even much - like human thinking. In particular, they don't need to "think" in one language. More concretely, in the DeepSeek R1 paper[2] they observed this "thought language mixing" and did some experiments on suppressing it... and the model results got worse. So I wouldn't personally think of it as an "error", but rather as just an artifact of how these things work. [1]: By this I mean "whatever it is they do that can be thought of as sorta kind roughly analogous to what we generally call thinking." I'm not interested in getting into a debate (here) about the exact nature of thinking and whether or not it's "correct" to refer to LLM's as "thinking". It's a colloquialism that I find useful in this context, nothing more. [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12948 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12948