Glossary · Term

premature confidence

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Definition

When an AI commits to its answer before doing any of the reasoning it later writes down.

A reasoning failure mode diagnosed via mid-chain probes: the model's confidence in its eventual final answer is already saturated at the start of the chain, indicating the reasoning text is decorative rather than causal.

Mentioned in 1 episode

  1. 081
    When Reasoning Models Decide Before They Think: Detecting and Fixing Premature Confidence