Comment by the_mitsuhiko

> Of course we don't know what kind of information the model encodes in the specific token choices - I.e. the tokens might not mean to the model what we think they mean.

What I think is interesting about this is that for the most part reading the reasoning output is something we can understand. The tokens as produced form english sentences, make intuitive sense. If we think of the reasoning output block as basically just "hidden state" then one could imagine that a there might be a more efficient representation that trades human understanding for just priming the internal state of the model.

In some abstract sense you can already get that by asking the model to operate in different languages. My first experience with reasoning models where you could see the output of the thinking block I think was QwQ which just reasoned in Chinese most of the time, even if the final output was German. Deepseek will sometimes keep reasoning in English even if you ask it German stuff, sometimes it does reason in German. All in all, there might be a more efficient representation of the internal state if one forgoes human readable output.