The higher token output is not by accident. Certain kinds of logical reasoning problems are solved by longer thinking output. Thinking chain output is usually kept to a reasonable length to limit latency and cost, but if pure benchmark performance is the goal you can crank that up to the max until the point of diminishing returns. DeepSeek being 30x cheaper than Gemini means there’s little downside to max out the thinking time. It’s been shown that you can further scale this by running many solution attempts in parallel with max thinking then using a model to choose a final answer, so increasing reasoning performance by increasing inference compute has a pretty high ceiling.