There's a real change (compared to 3.6) in the way it writes in thinking — it drops words like "to" and "we" in "We need to", talks generally in note form, drops the/and all over the place, avoids "for".
"Need be helpful concise", "Need maybe not overdo", "Need ask!" Almost caveman.
I have an (unsourced, vague) suspicion that this rather unique thinking trace pattern is actually hobbling the MTP predictions, which seem to perform poorly.
Other notes: it uses the trick of repeating the prompt in the thinking trace.
It also worries about hidden chain of thought appearing in the final answer. It talks about "desired oververbosity 9", which is new. A bit GPT-ish.
It is being extraordinarily thorough in thinking through one of my code requests, but I don't know if the net result will be any better than the 35B MoE.
I asked it to ask me clarifying questions — it did, and it offered me a list of defaults I could simply agree to.
I don't think it is necessarily overthinking in the looping sense, but it is in the being exhaustive sense. I need to explore how it does with a tighter reasoning budget.
I am impressed but I am definitely in Camp Please-35B-A3B-When? here, because on an M1 Max this isn't really practical. I hope they do one, though I think they may not.
This is pretty much Chinese grammar with English words. In Chinese you'd say "need ask" or "I need ask" if you want to be unusually verbose, but there's no "to".
All your examples align with this too. It just sounds to me like its optimising by removing the superfluous English words and thinking more Chinesely.
I also noticed that if you ask it to write text content to a certain word length (like "please write 250 words about the potato"), it now takes its sweet time "manually" counting each word in its draft output. It puts a number next to each word and iterates through all of its draft paragraphs and tries to stick to a strict word count. This is with temperature 1.0 as recommended.
Annnnd the code of my WP code test is not better. It is bushy, overcomplicated, and has gone around the houses to do stuff it would not need to do if it hadn't overthought.
Oh dear. I need to try to understand what is going on here.
"Need be helpful concise", "Need maybe not overdo", "Need ask!" Almost caveman.
I have an (unsourced, vague) suspicion that this rather unique thinking trace pattern is actually hobbling the MTP predictions, which seem to perform poorly.
Other notes: it uses the trick of repeating the prompt in the thinking trace.
It also worries about hidden chain of thought appearing in the final answer. It talks about "desired oververbosity 9", which is new. A bit GPT-ish.
It is being extraordinarily thorough in thinking through one of my code requests, but I don't know if the net result will be any better than the 35B MoE.
I asked it to ask me clarifying questions — it did, and it offered me a list of defaults I could simply agree to.
I don't think it is necessarily overthinking in the looping sense, but it is in the being exhaustive sense. I need to explore how it does with a tighter reasoning budget.
I am impressed but I am definitely in Camp Please-35B-A3B-When? here, because on an M1 Max this isn't really practical. I hope they do one, though I think they may not.