alt Hacker NewsThe weird thing about this model is that it spits out Chinese characters just like the chinese models when chatting with it in German. Happened to me quite often during the past few days.
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Does this suggest Mistral is distilling Deepseek et. al.? Can distillation keep passing through with high fidelity, or is it lossy like copying a VHS tape?
I've seen this quite a bit on bad quants as well. I ran an early and very lossy quant of one of the Gemma3 models, and it loved to just stick Chinese and Korean characters into the text, sometimes without seeming to realize it had mixed languages.
Ha, ha. Just like when Tilly Norwood switched to Chinese while interviewing with Piers Morgan [1].
On a serious note, I remember getting spooked when I saw a bunch of Chinese characters dumped out into some of my server logs (pre-LLM era). When I pasted the Chinese content from my log into google translate, it was just complete nonsense. Later I found a bug that was dumping raw binary data into my log file which interpreted as Chinese characters when viewed in a text editor. Perhaps similar bugs existed in the models.
Can you please share: - what specific input you see this issue with? - which interface you used (API, playground, specific sdk version or a wrapper app)? - whether the chinese chars appear in the thinking section or the output?
Thanks.
happened to me with Gemini too, actually. it sometimes just randomly decides to answer in a different language.
Google also does that surprisingly
Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 did the same; they would output random Chinese characters and then say “I made a typo, let me fix it” and it’s just them removing that stay Chinese characters. Haven’t seen this since 5.1 family of models.