LLMs are hopelessly confused about which model they are. Ask DeepSeek V4 Flash which model it is, and it's 50/50 between "I am DeepSeek (深度求索)" and "I am part of the GPT-4 series developed by OpenAI." Ask Claude, it'll say Claude. Ask Claude in Chinese, it'll sometimes say DeepSeek.
It's incredibly funny, but I don't know whether it's related to distillation; it's probably quite rare for a distilled trace to mention which model it came from. (I'm not saying distillation doesn't happen, just that it's possibly unrelated.)
For your specific example, the internet is full of "As a large language model developed by OpenAI, I can't..." due to people pasting chatbot output without reading it. Seems reasonable for that to surface as part of the CoT for your question about model capabilities.
LLMs are hopelessly confused about which model they are. Ask DeepSeek V4 Flash which model it is, and it's 50/50 between "I am DeepSeek (深度求索)" and "I am part of the GPT-4 series developed by OpenAI." Ask Claude, it'll say Claude. Ask Claude in Chinese, it'll sometimes say DeepSeek.
It's incredibly funny, but I don't know whether it's related to distillation; it's probably quite rare for a distilled trace to mention which model it came from. (I'm not saying distillation doesn't happen, just that it's possibly unrelated.)
For your specific example, the internet is full of "As a large language model developed by OpenAI, I can't..." due to people pasting chatbot output without reading it. Seems reasonable for that to surface as part of the CoT for your question about model capabilities.