The baked-in assumptions observation is basically the opposite of the impression I get after watching Gemini 3's CoT. With the maximum reasoning effort it's able to break out of the wrong route by rethinking the strategy. For example I gave it an onion address without the .onion part, and told it to figure out what this string means. All reasoning models including Gemini 2.5 and 3 assume it's a puzzle or a cipher (because they're trained on those) and start endlessly applying different algorithms to no avail. Gemini 3 Pro is the only model that can break the initial assumption after running out of ideas ("Wait, the user said it's just a string, what if it's NOT obfuscated"), and correctly identify the string as an onion address. My guess is they trained it on simulations to enforce the anti-jailbreaking commands injected by the Model Armor, as its CoT is incredibly paranoid at times. I could be wrong, of course.
I've had some weird "thinking outside the box" behavior like this. I once asked 3 Pro what Ozzy Osbourne is up to. The CoT was a journey, I can tell you! It's not in its training data that he actually passed away. It did know he was planning a tour though. It had a real struggle trying to consolidate "suspicious search results" and even questioned whether it was fake news, or running against a simulation!, determining it wasn't going to fall for my "test".
It did ultimately decide Ozzy was alive. I pushed back on that, and it instantly corrected itself and partially blamed my query "what is he up to" for being formulated as if he was alive.
Odd, mine didn't do anything interesting.