AI Glossary

Reasoning model

Also called thinking model

What does “Reasoning model” mean?

Reasoning model: Language models trained to work through a problem step by step before giving a final answer, often producing a long internal chain of thought. Spending more computation at answer time tends to improve results on math, coding and multi-step logic.

Reasoning model visual guide: Language models trained to work through a problem step by step before giving a final answer, often producing a long internal chain of thought. Spending more computation at answer time tends to improve results on math, coding and multi-step logic.
Visual guide Open full size (new tab)

What is an example of “Reasoning model”?

OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1 popularized the approach; many assistants now let users trade extra waiting time for more careful answers.

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See also

Chain of thoughtTermReinforcement learning from verifiable rewardsTermLarge language modelTermFrontier modelTerm

Same topic

Recurrent neural networkTermPositional encodingTermSelf-attentionTermOpen-weight modelTermSmall language modelTerm