I wonder if it's so circuitous because it buys the model more tokens for some sort of pseudo-reasoning before it locks in a token where there's no turning back. like it lets it push the logprobs way way way towards the right answer.

Plus using all this made up jargon and the unclear references to everything else (im referring to like the 'it' "XYZ is implemented using ABC. 123 referrs to it" you get in claudeslop) is very hard to understand but also kind of impossible to be wrong no? If it said "123 refers to ABC" but meant XYZ instead of ABC it's SOL but instead if it says "it" future tokens can ramble themselves out of being wrong thanks to the annoying slop ambiguity.

the problem with those hypothesis is that models don't in fact all talk the same (unless they're distilling claude). however if I unburden myself from having to be correct and allow myself to make up some more bullshit - what if "its not x its y" helps compute the right answer. Attending to that 'not x' could help point in the right direction in whatever dimension in latent space it needs to find the right y — and what if emdashes are proletariat filler tokens.

probably tho they're just RLing them to hell and back on code stuff and not paying attention to it and none of that is real lol. IIRC they rled opus 5.5 on talking more normal and it does and is also better than opus 5 so like with most things here, just another product decision on where to burn GPUs