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Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

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Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#31

News flash: people who scraped the Internet without permission to build their product complain when something vaguely similar is done to them. Water still wet, sky still blue. Film at 11. (slibhb: Don't get me wrong, I agree with you 99%. But the frontier labs have zero moral authority here.)

I'd send them the worlds smallest violin but Rufus is getting in the way of me finding it.

I had to install an add-on in Waterfox to stop Rufus from following me around and interjecting every 2 minutes.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#32

News flash: people who scraped the Internet without permission to build their product complain when something vaguely similar is done to them. Water still wet, sky still blue. Film at 11. (slibhb: Don't get me wrong, I agree with you 99%. But the frontier labs have zero moral authority here.)

I understand people just get off posting stuff like this. But creating LLMs from the entire corpus of human text was a huge achievement. Distilling those models is much less of an achievement. It means China is further behind than we thought.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me happy because it means that these misanthropic technofascists have no moat. They can spend trillions of dollars only for it to be largely copied in short order. Even if they weren't political adversaries of freedom, I would still feel 0% bad given all their training is already on data they got for free. Information continues to want to be free. To the benefit of us all.

Preach brother, they stole everything on the internet, and beyond, to train their models. They thought all that information was free, and everyone a few months beyond them is just following their example.

They didn't actually steal in the sense that the information is still there on the internet.... About these shredded rare books, now we're talking.

If I may propose instead of "steal" I think we could agree to write they "Aaron-Swartz'ed" the information from the internet, what do you think, is this too harsh on Sam Altman or Carmen Ortiz ?

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#34
post #18

It's interesting that someone else noticed this. A week or two ago, GPT-5.6 Sol starting leaking reasoning into a tool call in Pi. I don't really know what happened, but it was ... interesting: Attach. Use hub debugger. Ensure source binary perhaps same. start. todo init. parallel no. two tool calls in same turn sequential is okay. immediately. exactly. Need not mention apologies yet final. [...] Let's do. [...] Do t…

I've read an embarrassing amount of Qwen 3.8 27b cot and it's nothing like this. I'm not refuting the OP, though, which is about continuation.

This is Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_S quantization (edit -- on llama.cpp, via the Vulkan backend, on an RX 7900 XT, with Unsloth's recommended sampler config), for "as replicable as LLMs can be" disclosure, done through llama.cpp's web UI. In another thread, via Open WebUI (both with no custom prompt, so whatever the "default" system prompt is), a reasoning block opens as such:

  We need answer user's request: write complete short story scene 2000-3000 words, third-person limited with Rowan, no outline preamble analysis. Need satisfy plot elements: raccoon, Milo returns, storm power failure, elderly customer knocks, thermos somewhere. End scene feels finished. Need produce only story. Need think in English (user English). Need craft 2000-3000 words. Need no meta. Let's plan.
Now, I will add that when I use Qwen3.8 in a coding harness, the reasoning tends to NOT look like this, and instead looks more Qwen3.6-ish.

But when I give short prompts to Qwen3.8 with no system prompt or previous instructions, it seems to strongly gravitate towards grug-talk.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#35
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but TFA is trying to use Qwen's reaction to the thoughts as proof that they did indeed extract thoughts to train on. My point is that any model trained after August 10 will know of those specific thoughts.

I'm sorry, it's going over my head still - my reading is "all models with any training after August 10 know how GPT 5.5 Pro thinks", but I'm not sure why - my initial guess was that's when GPT 5.5 was released, but that doesn't seem to be the case (it was released April 23rd).

They would know the specific thoughts released by the "stolen thought" paper, which became part of the public internet on August 10.

Unfortunately those are the only thought examples you can use to perform this experiment, as no other are availible.

But as the model should have seen those specific examples, it's not a good signal that Qwen was exfiltrating thinking traces.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#36
As a user of local models, does this mean that there are 'magic incantations' that can increase the performance of some local models?

I see some details about recovering information via whatever technique. It's interesting, but appears not generalized.

So for a specific question, yes, but this is not about techniques like adding a good embedding that just generally tends to improve open model performance on certain tasks.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach brother, they stole everything on the internet, and beyond, to train their models. They thought all that information was free, and everyone a few months beyond them is just following their example.

They didn't actually steal in the sense that the information is still there on the internet.... About these shredded rare books, now we're talking. If I may propose instead of "steal" I think we could agree to write they "Aaron-Swartz'ed" the information from the internet, what do you think, is this too harsh on Sam Altman or Carmen Ortiz ?

Is anything too harsh for these new robber barons?

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#39

As a user of local models, does this mean that there are 'magic incantations' that can increase the performance of some local models? I see some details about recovering information via whatever technique. It's interesting, but appears not generalized. So for a specific question, yes, but this is not about techniques like adding a good embedding that just generally tends to improve open model performance on certain t…

I don't think that follows from the published results. Would have been an interesting hypothesis to add though, and quite easy. Just throw the same setup at some benchmarks.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#40
post #26

I wasn't aware that we have access to raw reasoning tokens? I thought what you get is a kind of summary. Does the author have some kind of privileged access or was my assumption wrong? But for the question studied here it probably doesn't matter - overlaps in the publicly available output may be indicative of distillation (or not), regardless of what it is. I would just find it surprising that the Chinese labs would…

They reference this paper which describes a method to decrypt reasoning traces (by sending the encrypted trace back to the model and asking it to transcribe it):

https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf

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