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What has been going on with deepseek recently? I have gotten lots of replies in Chinese and even more frequently, reasoning in Chinese as well. Is it a new sil
by bjoli 4mo ago
What has been going on with deepseek recently? I have gotten lots of replies in Chinese and even more frequently, reasoning in Chinese as well.
Is it a new silent update?
- abyssin 4mo agoIt doesn’t seem that recent to me, at least been like that for six months.
- Shank 4mo agoWell, it is a Chinese model, maybe it thinks better in Chinese?
- bogdan 4mo agoHànzì can use 30%-40% fewer tokens than English. So, yes, it probably thinks better in Chinese.
- Razengan 4mo agoIf so, would other models like ChatGPT benefit from translating the user's prompt to Chinese/Japanese and thinking in Hanzi/Kanji and then converting the response back to the user's language before displaying it?
- cocoflunchy 4mo agoI believe that most reasoning models actually think in their own "language" which is not really understandable by humans. The thinking traces that are shown in the UI are actually summaries generated by a smaller model in plain english (or user language). Sometimes this leaks through and you see some chinese/japanese characters in e.g. Claude's reasoning.
- seydor 4mo ago> summaries generated Or hallucinated
- dryarzeg 4mo agoAs far as I'm aware, it's not true for models like DeepSeek or other Chinese open-weight models (at least those that I have seen); their reasoning traces are fully composed from some human language, be it English, Chinese or another one; by the way, most of them can adapt their reasoning based on user language, for example, if user speaks English the reasoning more likely will be in English. I think that for DeepSeek problem (thinking and replying in Chinese) everything is kinda simpler: in their official chat, they're probably using some kind of system prompt which is (probably) written in Chinese, so that's why model may prefer Chinese in it's output.
- calgoo 4mo agoI have seen mixed language thinking from claude when i speak to it in english but we are discussing a product thats in spanish or searching amazon spain.
- kgeist 4mo agoSummaries by different smaller models are usually made by closed proprietary models like Claude as a way to combat the distillation of real reasoning traces by competitors. Open weight models show the real reasoning traces. Reasoning traces operate in the same space as the non-reasoning output. It's all just one large text for an LLM. Internally, reasoning is just ordinary chat completion between <think></think> tags.
- ForceBru 4mo agoWait, this isn't real, is it? Is there actually an intermediate model that translates DeepSeek's thinking from its "alien language" into human languages? That's not actually the case, right? I thought "thinking" is literally the model generating additional text in a human language that shows its "thought process". It's added to the model's context, which helps it reason better because it now has this self-generated context. The "their own language" idea seems to come from some recent science fiction where LLMs develop their alien language and take over the world by 2037 or something.
- bogdan 4mo agoThere are other even more efficient ways of doing this, i.e. using images instead of raw text https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1980397031542989305?lang=en https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1980397031542989305?lang...
- grogg 4mo agoYeah, it’s why the Caveman skill includes a Wenyan mode. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
- hnfong 4mo agoThere was some funny suggestion online with using Classical Chinese (which has a similar status to Latin in Europe, and it uses at least 50% less characters, probably similar savings with tokens) to reason. Don't know whether the reasoning levels were on par with modern languages, but it was worth a laugh.
- rurban 4mo agoA chinese model which tells me it is Claude from Anthropic? Not really. Chinese HW yes, SW not.
- dubcanada 4mo agoGoogle Chrome tells me it's like 14 different things. How is that any different then DeepSeek saying it is Claude?
- Hamuko 4mo agoI guess Claude isn’t an American model either considering how Anthropic has fed basically all of the globe into it.
- emodendroket 4mo agoI've seen that people can get Claude and friends to say they're DeepSeek if they ask in Chinese. I think distillation is happening all the time.
- SkyBelow 4mo agoBut why does it do so inconsistently, and sometimes even forgetting to swap back to English when it comes time to do 'normal' output? It also seems recent, as when I was using deepseek even a week ago this was very rare compared to what I was seeing yesterday. I had to start including a line asking it to stay to English because I can only speak/read English.
- RIshabh235 4mo agoyes, kind of silent update plus they might have better chinese datasets and user data for their training, that might be leading to chinese preference.
- epolanski 4mo agoIt never happened to me with Deepseek, but it happened multiple times with Kimi 2.6. It also happened a handful of times with Anthropic models.
- alfiedotwtf 4mo agoAre you running out of context? I’ve found that tooling and giberish most of the time happens when I’m butting up against the high watermark of my context window. One other thing it could be, I’ve read that lower quanta like Q1 and Q2 for smaller models can leak Chinese
- surgical_fire 4mo agoI use DeepSeek daily, never happened to me. I use the API however, not the chat interface.
- serf 4mo agoThis happens to me a lot when I ask a qwen3.6 model to respond to a question in JSON. No clue why.
- k__ 4mo agoMaybe, you could pipe it through T5 or something.
- cicko 4mo agoit's a hint that you should start learning the new Lingua Franca.
- throwa356262 4mo agoHappened to me with Claude, doesn't need to be a China thing.
- fdsjgfklsfd 4mo agoYeah the reasoning is formatted differently and the replies are often in Chinese.
- whalesalad 4mo agothat is the long con - eventually we all become chinese.