Comment by AdamConwayIE

Likely something that was first made especially obvious by Chinese models and then became something worth optimizing for in English too.

Chinese can be extremely information-dense in token terms, though it depends on the tokenizer. Roughly speaking, you can pack more "meaning" into a short sequence than English often allows for. That's why "caveman" reasoning is a pretty good fit.

There's a difference between bolting caveman speak onto an existing model and training a model to reason that way, though. If you just force an existing model to be concise in outputs, you're artificially reducing its available reasoning steps and can possibly prevent useful exploration or verification. If it's trained specifically to use compressed reasoning, it can learn to represent the same intermediate ideas in fewer generated tokens, cutting the number of sequential inference steps without necessarily sacrificing the useful reasoning itself.

It's not so much inherently a Chinese-model trait, but Chinese models could definitely have helped demonstrate how effective very compressed reasoning traces can be.

There are few tests of this, but one example I thought was interesting was here: https://github.com/PastaPastaPasta/llm-chinese-english

I wouldn't say it was Chinese specifically that was emulated, but it got people thinking about tokenizers and representation efficiency, and how natural English is rather inefficient.