This is extremely cool research—great idea to look at that capability of exiting the CoT voluntarily!
My experience has been that Claude is very eager to reason in its response channel relative to other models. I will often have to apply additional prompt pressure to Claude models (with native reasoning turned off) in out-of-context reasoning experiments.
It seems like here GPT 5.4 needed the opposite treatment—the blanking prompt has additional pressure to reason in the response channel (i.e by detailing the series of md documents to produce). I take from this post that this is a desirable safety quality.
I feel like removing the propensity to reason in user facing output might involve some tradeoffs—For example, I wonder—is a propensity to continue to reason as you respond correlated with good epistemic character?
This is extremely cool research—great idea to look at that capability of exiting the CoT voluntarily!
My experience has been that Claude is very eager to reason in its response channel relative to other models. I will often have to apply additional prompt pressure to Claude models (with native reasoning turned off) in out-of-context reasoning experiments.
It seems like here GPT 5.4 needed the opposite treatment—the blanking prompt has additional pressure to reason in the response channel (i.e by detailing the series of md documents to produce). I take from this post that this is a desirable safety quality.
I feel like removing the propensity to reason in user facing output might involve some tradeoffs—For example, I wonder—is a propensity to continue to reason as you respond correlated with good epistemic character?