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Sounds nice! But, the web ui chat version of flash has very poor language following abilities in my experience: You may ask it something in English, and get a
by jiehong 25d ago
Sounds nice!
But, the web ui chat version of flash has very poor language following abilities in my experience:
You may ask it something in English, and get a thinking chain in Chinese with an answer in Chinese, or an English thinking chain and an English answer. Using the retry button on the same question has a 50/50 chance of any of those results.
Sometimes, asking something in English, but where information are mostly in another language may make the answer in the language where data has been found. The other day, I asked something about a local German thing, in English, and I got an answer in German instead. It’s as if all the language data stirred it away from the language of the user’s question.
- swiftcoder 25d agoI've hit this too, but you can just add "in English" to steer it
- gentlewater 25d agoI finally uninstalled the app yesterday after giving it plenty of chances over several months. Yesterday, I asked it whether «DeepSeek has fixed the issue where it erroneously answers in Chinese?» and it answered in Chinese.
- elaus 25d agoSo you did not do what the post you replied to suggested?
- michimagdesign 25d agoThis shouldn’t be a user-facing issue. The web UI should inject the account’s language setting or solve it like competitors. They’ve mentioned giving it multiple chances but it’s still not fixed.
- alightsoul 25d agoAnthropic does the same thing but it's not problem
- gentlewater 25d agoOh, I’ve tried that too. It will promise to keep it in English from here on out, then switch back to Chinese after two or three exchanges. When ever it needs to do a web search, it seems to load so much Chinese text that it forgets any language instructions. Just thought my experience yesterday was more to the point. Right now the chat is absolutely hopeless.
- swiftcoder 25d agohuh. mine only does this on the first turn on a new computer. Once I've told it once it seems to be entirely sticky on that device from then on
- jtbayly 25d agoOn the contrary, this is very strong steering in a prompt!
- fdsjgfklsfd 25d agoNo you can't. It still responds in Chinese after explicitly asking it to "Always reason and respond in English."
- swiftcoder 25d agoI've literally only done this once per computer I use the web interface on, and it's always stuck thereafter. I can't speak to the mobile app
- el_io 25d agoI'm also totally not sure why it do that, but I guess because they're searching from China and web results comeback in Chinese so the model start using that.
- kgeist 25d agoThe web UI's system prompt is also probably in Chinese
- epolanski 25d agoI've occasionally got chinese characters in anthropic/openai's responses too, locally on codex/claude. Hasn't happened in a while, last time was when I was testing fable 5 in june.
- oefrha 25d agoI don’t know what model codex uses for session summarization (I use Pro subscription, no third party models), but I get Chinese summaries from time to time, when the only Chinese that could have appeared in the session would be an i18n strings file that it may or may not have loaded. Very puzzling. Last happened yesterday.
- apexalpha 25d agoI have the same issue, sometimes. I initially thought it was a trick, that using Chinese chars is somehow more info dense and it saves tokens to 'think' in Chinese. But later on it became more erratic. I still wonder if token reduction would work that way.
- miroljub 25d agoYep, the same issue. I even defined a dictionary shortcut on my phone to expand aie to "Answer in English!", but every so often it takes 5 times to force it to switch to English. Interesting though, when I ask questions in German or my native language, I rarely get Chinese answers. Looks like English is most affected. API never answers in Chinese.
- tinyhouse 25d agoI've been working with Pro and it's been great so far.
- mattmcal 25d agoIt's not just web chat, V4 Flash 7/31 suffers from a lot of pathological behavior in coding harnesses as well, e.g. infinite loops, hallucinations, premature termination, and invalid tool calls.
- CharlesW 25d agoFWIW, I haven’t experienced any of that using V4 Flash via DeepSeek in omp. What’s your coding harness and inference provider?
- rpdillon 25d agoSame. My side projects are coded almost exclusively with the Deepseek V4 Flash 07/31 in omp, and it recovers beautifully in every case. I'm using OpenCode Zen.
- mattmcal 25d agoOpenCode but I variously use DeepSeek API/OpenRouter/Vercel AI gateway. I'm sure it's the combo of model + inference provider that is the issue and not the model alone. DeepSeek API also has far better inference speed and reliability than the cheapest providers. That said I never seem to have these issues when using GLM 5.3 flash served by OpenRouter/Vercel.
- bendangelo 25d agoThis never happens on the deepseek api. It’s always a different provider using lower quants.
- pimeys 25d agoAll of these flash models have this. You have to build your harness so that it deals with it. Infinite loops are solved by having an error message that says what to do differently on failure, invalid tool calls are solved by making the tool schema less strict and detect things in the runtime etc. Hallucinations you can't fix. Gemini is a bit worse there than DeepSeek, but there's not much research on how to fix that. The only one is the CaMeL paper by Google, where you tag every prompt and result and then for every assistant response or tool call you first check where it got that data and error if you notice fabrication. This one is really annoying to implement. With larger models the fabrication starts when the context grows or if you have too many tools, for flash models it's much earlier. We use the flash models for repetitive agentic tasks, where the prompt defines clearly what to do and how. The whole run is about 4-5 steps typically, and context size stays in the comfort zone.
- lampe3 25d agoAll flash llms have this problems. gemini. I start to a new chat write in german and suddenly it answers in english. I take the free chat gpt one writ with it in polish suddenly english.
- djeastm 25d agoYou see this on Reddit where the bot accounts will just comment in German, French or Italian randomly (and other bot accounts responding to it won't even bat an eye, responding in English as if it's the most natural thing in the world)
- prussia 25d agoIt's a bit more complicated than that because Reddit now automatically tries to translate comments not in the user's language.
- cheema33 25d agoYep. I faced the exact same issue. Too many times. And then just gave up.
- vintermann 25d agoVery odd. I've used DeepSeek heavily for some weeks, and haven't seen a single Chinese character either in its replies or its thinking. Are you using a quantified model or a different provider by any chance?
- red_green_yell 25d agoThere is a chrome extension that injects “respond in English” and “English [checkbox emoji]” to every query. This helps a lot but I still sometimes get Chinese responses. I have not had this issue via api on openrouter.