EP007 — When the Words Aren't the Thinking (Latent Reasoning)

When you ask a modern language model to "think step by step," it writes out intermediate reasoning before answering and tends to do better on hard problems. The field has been treating those written steps as the reasoning itself. A new position paper from Wenshuo Wang argues that the evidence currently favors a different picture: the real reasoning happens in the hidden internal states moving through the network's layers, and the chain of thought is more like a transcript — sometimes faithful, often not. The cross-domain parallel is Nisbett and Wilson's 1977 stocking experiment, where shoppers gave confident, articulate explanations for choices that were actually driven by something they never mentioned.