OpenAI's AI reasoning model 'thinks' in Chinese sometimes and no one really knows why
OpenAI's o1 'reasoning' model sometimes switches to Chinese and other languages as it reasons through problems, and AI experts don't know exactly why.
Shortly after OpenAI released o1, its first “reasoning” AI model, people began noting a curious phenomenon. The model would sometimes begin “thinking” in Chinese, Persian, or some other language — even when asked a question in English.
Given a problem to sort out — e.g. “How many R’s are in the word ‘strawberry?’” — o1 would begin its “thought” process, arriving at an answer by performing a series of reasoning steps. If the question was written in English, o1’s final response would be in English. But the model would perform some steps in another language before drawing its conclusion.
“[O1] randomly started thinking in Chinese halfway through,” one user on Reddit said.