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Ask HN: Dear Anthropic, can we please have thought traces back?

10 points by exabrial ↗ HN
Dear Anthropic, can we please have thought traces back?

I can't verify whether or not the LLM is arriving at the conclusion from cheating, or if it's fudging or making stuff up.

Opus 4.6 remains the best model because of this.

9 comments

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bigyabai
> Opus 4.6 remains the best model because of this.

Huh? Are you not trying other open-weight models that stream thinking traces?

The new DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 should clobber Opus 4.6 in a lot of tasks. Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 feel like they stand toe-to-toe with Opus 4.8 in my experience. This probably isn't the last stupid decision that Anthropic stands on, you might as well hedge your bet and put some money into another inference provider and see how it goes.

Loveispain
Deepseek has shifted to my general go to, this being one of the factors. Most likely claude is making up some small details to reinforce what it thinks is right or optimal, but generally still right.

Only recent quirk in longer chats with Deepseek, watching the the thought process and output; it sometimes becomes Chinese. Also not sure if this is to intentionally hide the thought process, or the actual information needs to be looked up and explained in Chinese.

setnone
yeah this feels frustrating with claude, a black box inside a black box. good thing they got competitors
tudelo
There is, in my personal opinion, a reason that reasoning is not front and center. Partially related to distillation.
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cyrbuzz
Maybe cheat is a one of the factors of model?
satvikpendem
In what form are you using Claude? In Claude Code in their desktop app, you can enable thinking via the transcript drop-down, and while it's not the exact thinking the model does as that makes it susceptible to distillation, it does work well enough for the user to understand what is being done by the model.