There's a real change (compared to 3.6) in the way it writes in thinking — it drops words like "to" and "we" in "We need to", talks generally in note form, drops the/and all over the place, avoids "for".

"Need be helpful concise", "Need maybe not overdo", "Need ask!" Almost caveman.

I have an (unsourced, vague) suspicion that this rather unique thinking trace pattern is actually hobbling the MTP predictions, which seem to perform poorly.

Other notes: it uses the trick of repeating the prompt in the thinking trace.

It also worries about hidden chain of thought appearing in the final answer. It talks about "desired oververbosity 9", which is new. A bit GPT-ish.

It is being extraordinarily thorough in thinking through one of my code requests, but I don't know if the net result will be any better than the 35B MoE.

I asked it to ask me clarifying questions — it did, and it offered me a list of defaults I could simply agree to.

I don't think it is necessarily overthinking in the looping sense, but it is in the being exhaustive sense. I need to explore how it does with a tighter reasoning budget.

I am impressed but I am definitely in Camp Please-35B-A3B-When? here, because on an M1 Max this isn't really practical. I hope they do one, though I think they may not.