What happened: "Thinking" or reasoning models spend extra inference compute working through a problem step by step in an extended internal reasoning phase before producing a final answer — trading latency and cost for accuracy on hard tasks.
Why it matters: This isn't a bigger model — it's the same model given more time to think per query. That changes the cost and latency calculus: you now pick a "how hard should this think" setting per task, not just a model size.
What's actually different
Standard models generate a response in roughly one forward pass per token. Reasoning models generate additional intermediate reasoning tokens — exploring, backtracking, checking their own work — before committing to the final answer. More compute at inference time, not more parameters.
When it helps
- Multi-step math and logic problems where a wrong early step ruins the answer
- Debugging — tracing through a failure requires holding several hypotheses at once
- Planning tasks with several interacting constraints
When it's overkill
Simple lookups, classification, formatting, or anything with a single obvious answer. Reasoning mode adds real latency and cost for no accuracy gain on easy tasks — route by task difficulty, not by default.
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