---
title: "Reasoning model: what it means · The AI Compute Race · DRYBURGH"
source: https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/reasoning-model
description: "Reasoning model: A model that spends more time thinking at inference before it answers. Chapter 2."
---

# Reasoning model

What does “Reasoning model” mean?

Reasoning modelA model that spends more time thinking at inference before it answers. *Chapter 2.*

From *The AI Compute Race*. [Read the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#buy)

## Where the book uses it

- [Chapter 2 — The Discovery That Changed Everything](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes/chapter-2)How a formula about compute and capability became a bill: the scaling laws, the first supercomputers built to test them, and why the money came before the paper.

## Sources that use it

- Ben Cottier, Ben Snodin, David Owen and Tom Adamczewski, “LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks,” Epoch AI Data Insight, 12 March 2025 (from the page’s method block, read 19 September 2026: “Across all of these benchmarks and performance thresholds, we found prices declining between 9x per year and 900x per year, with a median of 50x per year”, on six benchmarks with a rate fitted at each score threshold that a new model had set; “The fastest price drops in that range have occurred in the past year, so it’s less clear that those will persist”; “We set a threshold of at least 4 data points to include a regression result”; “All prices were a 3:1 weighted average of input and output token prices”; “We excluded reasoning models from our analysis of per-token prices. Reasoning models tend to generate a much larger number of tokens than other models, making these models cost more in total to evaluate on a benchmark”; with all model data before January 2024 removed, “the median rate increased from 50x per year to 200x per year”; the release dates in the page’s table of priced models run from 20 November 2021 to 5 February 2025, and the data files behind the page are stamped as updated on 20 November 2025; the method block re-read live on 21 September 2026, every passage above unchanged, archived as VERIFY 260921/R68 B). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/research#epoch-inference-prices)

## Related terms

- [Inference](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/inference)
- [API](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/api)
- [Docket](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/docket)
- [Floating-point operation](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/floating-point-operation)
- [Loss](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/loss)
- [Power law](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/power-law)
- [Pre-training](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/pre-training)
- [Reinforcement learning](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/reinforcement-learning)
- [Scaling laws](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/scaling-laws)
- [Transformer](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/transformer)

From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.

- [Campuses](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/ledger)
- [Tests](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests)
- [Scorecard](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard)
- [Data](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/data/releases)
- [Chapter by chapter](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/companion)
- [The record at a glance](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/observatory)
- [The machine](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/machine)
- [One campus, four futures](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/hyperion)
- [Glossary](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary)
- [People](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/people)
- [Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources)
- [Notes](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes)
- [Where the book was wrong](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/corrections)
- [Where its sources were wrong](https://dryburgh.com/corrections?book=vol1)
- [The Paper](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/paper)
- [Consent](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/consent)
- [Who builds and pays](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/parties)

*The AI Compute Race: Five Races, One Machine* is a book by Lee S. Dryburgh, the first volume of THE COMPUTE ECONOMY, published by Dryburgh, an imprint of Contestra OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia; its record closes on 8 November 2026.

[About the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1)[Tell me when it is out](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#notify)