What are "reasoning" AI models?
“Reasoning” AI models1
An AI model that takes in some text and predicts how the text is most likely to continue.
Shorthand for “computing power”. It may refer to, for instance, physical infrastructure such as CPUs or GPUs that perform processing, or the amount of processing power needed to train a model.
These models use a process similar to chain-of-thought prompting
A technique which makes a language model generate intermediate reasoning steps in its output.
DeepSeek’s R1 reflecting on a query
Reasoning models require substantially more compute than non-reasoning models, which increases both their cost per token and their environmental impact.
As of Q1 2025, these models are rather new and there is no standardized name for this type of model. They have been called simulated reasoning models, chain-of-thought models, large reasoning models and enhanced reasoning models. ↩︎