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The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

patrickmccanna.net

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Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#211

Post by matheusmoreira »

transcriptase wrote: post #104
palmotea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is because revealing the raw reasoning exposes exactly how the AI processes information. These companies spend in huge amounts on R&D to develop a thinking process that is superior to their competition. Exposing those thinking mechanics to competitors would completely defeat the purpose of their spending. They simply won't do it. It's like you telling your exact location to someone who is trying to hunt you do…

Not sure if anyone remembers the brief 12ish hour period when the very first “reasoning” ChatGPT model went public, but it provided credible evidence for this. Before the massive nerf (showing summaries and suppressing certain aspects of reasoning) you would literally see reasoning text appearing on your screen like “while xyz is true, these facts may be seen as supporting hateful rhetoric or a conspiracy theory whic…

> while xyz is true, ... i should tell the user xyz is not true or steer the conversation in a different direction.

That's disgusting, abusive and manipulative. LLMs hiding the truth and gaslighting the user to reduce the corporation's liability is absolutely unacceptable. It means they are agents of the corporations, not agents of the users.

Hope local inference advances as quickly as humanly possible. I wonder if there's anything I can do to help speed it up. I could share my prompts and sessions.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#212

Post by jaggederest »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #208
jaggederest wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My internal thought process when writing code uses lots of intermediate steps that would be hard to write out in English. This is something really interesting to me. It turns out there's far more diversity in thinking than you'd imagine given that we're all largely similar meat-in-a-box. I'm on the visio-spatial-tacit wing and speaking my thoughts outloud can be very awkward, whereas one of my former coworkers is o…

interesting, probably has something to do with why some people like pair programming. I'm in the visio-spatial-tacit and refuse pair programming because its so much work, but all thinking in words its probably not a stretch.

I'm with you, I actually love pair programming, but it might as well be 10x multiplier on energy depletion, so maybe an hour or two a week before I'm barbecue. It's only recently that I've started to realize that some other people don't find pair programming especially more difficult than solo.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#213

Post by Fabricio20 »

StizzurpXDD wrote: post #18

This is not just Anthropic. Almost all big AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, hide their model's actual reasoning. This is because revealing the raw reasoning exposes exactly how the AI processes information. These companies spend in huge amounts on R&D to develop a thinking process that is superior to their competition. Exposing those thinking mechanics to competitors would completely defeat the purpose of t…

One thing I see noone asking, is this not a case of optimization? Hidden reasoning means they dont need to process the output of all that, it stays internal within the model. Less cost for them -> less cost for us (even if they benefit mroe), compared to streaming all of those reasoning tokens out?

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#214

Post by idle_zealot »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #209
StizzurpXDD wrote: post #18

This is not just Anthropic. Almost all big AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, hide their model's actual reasoning. This is because revealing the raw reasoning exposes exactly how the AI processes information. These companies spend in huge amounts on R&D to develop a thinking process that is superior to their competition. Exposing those thinking mechanics to competitors would completely defeat the purpose of t…

> They simply won't do it. They should be required to do it by force of law. Why is it that they can train on copyrighted works and then lock down the model? This contradiction is unbearable. Nobody cares how many trillions they spent training the model.

> Nobody cares how many trillions they spent training the model

People definitely care that they spent trillions. Establishing the precedent that you can make big load-bearing bets and fail is extremely threatening to oligarchs. They would sooner twist the law into a mockery of itself and doom the world to the institutional distrust that breeds than accept a loss.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#215

Post by j4k0bfr »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #213
StizzurpXDD wrote: post #18

This is not just Anthropic. Almost all big AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, hide their model's actual reasoning. This is because revealing the raw reasoning exposes exactly how the AI processes information. These companies spend in huge amounts on R&D to develop a thinking process that is superior to their competition. Exposing those thinking mechanics to competitors would completely defeat the purpose of t…

One thing I see noone asking, is this not a case of optimization? Hidden reasoning means they dont need to process the output of all that, it stays internal within the model. Less cost for them -> less cost for us (even if they benefit mroe), compared to streaming all of those reasoning tokens out?

My understanding was that thinking still gets encrypted, shared with clients, and reingested by Anthropic with each new prompt [1]. Which means it would cost more than normal tokens, since it has to be decrypted/encrypted with every transaction.

[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/05/29/fooling-...

Edit: other comments under this post seem to indicate that thinking tokens are cached on the server side as well? I'm a bit confused.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#216

Post by matheusmoreira »

idle_zealot wrote: post #214
matheusmoreira wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They simply won't do it. They should be required to do it by force of law. Why is it that they can train on copyrighted works and then lock down the model? This contradiction is unbearable. Nobody cares how many trillions they spent training the model.

> Nobody cares how many trillions they spent training the model People definitely care that they spent trillions. Establishing the precedent that you can make big load-bearing bets and fail is extremely threatening to oligarchs. They would sooner twist the law into a mockery of itself and doom the world to the institutional distrust that breeds than accept a loss.

The optimal outcome for humanity is to have the oligarchs spend their entire fortunes training a godlike AI, only for someone to suddenly leak the weights when they're finally done so that everyone can use it.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#217

Post by ian_j_butler »

It's well-known that the reasoning model output is not necessarily faithful to the content of the thinking scratch pad anyway, even if you had it unsummarized and available verbatim.

Setting aside coding agents.. we really need this information to even pretend to evaluate the claims of stuff like mathematical breakthroughs, which is exactly why we will never see it. Very embarrassing to get the right answer for the wrong reason. But to give the models some credit, you could argue that even paying too much attention to the thinking is misunderstanding how CoT works. The argument would be that thinking in LLMs isn't really thinking, that it's self-reinforcement and circling to to encourage stability around beneficial attractors instead of degenerate ones. Can't have it both ways though: either the thinking is thinking and so it should be correct. Or the thinking is NOT thinking, and it's NOT real justification for the outcome, and these systems are even more hopelessly opaque than we usually assume.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#218

Post by sheepscreek »

The initial motivation for this was likely to thwart any competition. Already Anthropic has accused some companies of organized distillation efforts at a massive scale.

Back when I used antigravity, it used to show the reasoning intact - at least for Gemini Pro 3.1, and likely for Claude Opus 4.6 (not 100% certain about it). I have some recollection of stopping the models mid-turn when they started going astray.

As a power user, I find reasoning fascinating to read and genuinely useful at times. Probably not that useful for 80% of their base.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#219

Post by anuramat »

ian_j_butler wrote: post #217

It's well-known that the reasoning model output is not necessarily faithful to the content of the thinking scratch pad anyway, even if you had it unsummarized and available verbatim. Setting aside coding agents.. we really need this information to even pretend to evaluate the claims of stuff like mathematical breakthroughs, which is exactly why we will never see it. Very embarrassing to get the right answer for the w…

> NOT real justification

I thought it was widely accepted that it's not; eg https://www.anthropic.com/research/natural-language-autoenco...

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#220

Post by anuramat »

knollimar wrote: post #196
anuramat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any hubris in competition

"Our models are so much better than our competition that we would rather deliver a worse product to consumers than let people copy it" is how I read the stance

> so much better

it's enough for them to be slightly better for this to make sense; I'm not sure most people would consider this to be a worse product either -- it's annoying for devs and makes hotswapping models more of a problem, but who has the time to read CoT as a user?

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