Stop Anthropomorphisizing Intermediate Tokens: Qwen3.8 doesn't "overthink"

Excerpt

Intermediate tokens, called "thinking" or "reasoning" actually are nothing like it. Humans do step-by-step reasoning leading to the conclusion. LLMs use intermediate traces to augment their prompt . This explains why sometimes the answer is very good but the "reasoning" is verbose. Flooding your context window or fighting compaction are different issues. edit: I love this section from the main research they linked. Our findings consistently challenge the prevailing narrative that intermediate to