AI_SLANG_ENTRY
Reasoning Model Meaning
A model marketed or designed to spend extra compute on hard problems before answering, especially math, coding, planning, and multi-step analysis.
What does Reasoning Model mean?
A model marketed or designed to spend extra compute on hard problems before answering, especially math, coding, planning, and multi-step analysis.
A reasoning model is tuned to work longer on problems that need multiple steps. It can be slower or costlier, but useful when the answer needs planning or verification.
Origin and usage
Became mainstream builder vocabulary after model providers started shipping dedicated reasoning models and controls for reasoning effort.
Source type: product-term. Last checked: 2026-07-05.
Current model-provider and developer-platform term; official API docs describe reasoning models and controls such as reasoning effort, while capabilities and naming vary by provider.
Examples
- Use a reasoning model for the migration plan, not for rewriting a button label.
- The reasoning model solved the puzzle and spent half the budget narrating its caution.