Sounds nice!

But, the web ui chat version of flash has very poor language following abilities in my experience:

You may ask it something in English, and get a thinking chain in Chinese with an answer in Chinese, or an English thinking chain and an English answer. Using the retry button on the same question has a 50/50 chance of any of those results.

Sometimes, asking something in English, but where information are mostly in another language may make the answer in the language where data has been found. The other day, I asked something about a local German thing, in English, and I got an answer in German instead. It’s as if all the language data stirred it away from the language of the user’s question.

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mattmcal 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not just web chat, V4 Flash 7/31 suffers from a lot of pathological behavior in coding harnesses as well, e.g. infinite loops, hallucinations, premature termination, and invalid tool calls.

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pimeys 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All of these flash models have this. You have to build your harness so that it deals with it. Infinite loops are solved by having an error message that says what to do differently on failure, invalid tool calls are solved by making the tool schema less strict and detect things in the runtime etc.

Hallucinations you can't fix. Gemini is a bit worse there than DeepSeek, but there's not much research on how to fix that. The only one is the CaMeL paper by Google, where you tag every prompt and result and then for every assistant response or tool call you first check where it got that data and error if you notice fabrication. This one is really annoying to implement.

With larger models the fabrication starts when the context grows or if you have too many tools, for flash models it's much earlier. We use the flash models for repetitive agentic tasks, where the prompt defines clearly what to do and how. The whole run is about 4-5 steps typically, and context size stays in the comfort zone.

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CharlesW 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FWIW, I haven’t experienced any of that using V4 Flash via DeepSeek in omp. What’s your coding harness and inference provider?

	▲	rpdillon an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Same. My side projects are coded almost exclusively with the Deepseek V4 Flash 07/31 in omp, and it recovers beautifully in every case. I'm using OpenCode Zen.

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K0IN 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have used the flash model for over 3b tokens and ofc. I saw some hallucinations and premature termination (I also get this on Astra - way more often than with deepseek v4 flash), but I never had a infinite loop (using the copilot as harness).

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bendangelo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This never happens on the deepseek api. It’s always a different provider using lower quants.

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swiftcoder 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've hit this too, but you can just add "in English" to steer it

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gentlewater 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I finally uninstalled the app yesterday after giving it plenty of chances over several months. Yesterday, I asked it whether «DeepSeek has fixed the issue where it erroneously answers in Chinese?» and it answered in Chinese.

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elaus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So you did not do what the post you replied to suggested?

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gentlewater 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, I’ve tried that too. It will promise to keep it in English from here on out, then switch back to Chinese after two or three exchanges. When ever it needs to do a web search, it seems to load so much Chinese text that it forgets any language instructions. Just thought my experience yesterday was more to the point. Right now the chat is absolutely hopeless.

	▲	swiftcoder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		huh. mine only does this on the first turn on a new computer. Once I've told it once it seems to be entirely sticky on that device from then on

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michimagdesign 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This shouldn’t be a user-facing issue. The web UI should inject the account’s language setting or solve it like competitors. They’ve mentioned giving it multiple chances but it’s still not fixed.

	▲	alightsoul 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Anthropic does the same thing but it's not problem

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lampe3 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All flash llms have this problems. gemini. I start to a new chat write in german and suddenly it answers in english.

I take the free chat gpt one writ with it in polish suddenly english.

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djeastm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You see this on Reddit where the bot accounts will just comment in German, French or Italian randomly (and other bot accounts responding to it won't even bat an eye, responding in English as if it's the most natural thing in the world)

	▲	prussia 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a bit more complicated than that because Reddit now automatically tries to translate comments not in the user's language.

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apexalpha 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have the same issue, sometimes.

I initially thought it was a trick, that using Chinese chars is somehow more info dense and it saves tokens to 'think' in Chinese.

But later on it became more erratic. I still wonder if token reduction would work that way.

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el_io 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm also totally not sure why it do that, but I guess because they're searching from China and web results comeback in Chinese so the model start using that.

	▲	kgeist 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The web UI's system prompt is also probably in Chinese

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miroljub 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep, the same issue. I even defined a dictionary shortcut on my phone to expand aie to "Answer in English!", but every so often it takes 5 times to force it to switch to English.

Interesting though, when I ask questions in German or my native language, I rarely get Chinese answers. Looks like English is most affected.

API never answers in Chinese.

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cheema33 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep. I faced the exact same issue. Too many times. And then just gave up.

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tinyhouse 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been working with Pro and it's been great so far.

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epolanski 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've occasionally got chinese characters in anthropic/openai's responses too, locally on codex/claude.

Hasn't happened in a while, last time was when I was testing fable 5 in june.

	▲	oefrha 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t know what model codex uses for session summarization (I use Pro subscription, no third party models), but I get Chinese summaries from time to time, when the only Chinese that could have appeared in the session would be an i18n strings file that it may or may not have loaded. Very puzzling. Last happened yesterday.