# Inherited, Not Invented: Tracing the Provenance of Wait in Reasoning Models > Source: > Published: 2026-10-23 04:00:19+00:00 Reinforcement learning (RL) is credited with teaching reasoning models to write {wait} before reconsidering a step, yet large RL accuracy gains do not require the word. This view can confuse what RL discovers with what a model inherits from its training data. We trace the word through open models' t