alt Hacker NewsIf we cut off an unconfident/expensive model early in thinking, then we don't have to pay for additional thinking cost at all. For many tasks, this is quite a large saving.
That being said, whatever models we select to race at any point will ALL have their cache updated, so if they're chosen on the next race they'll be a lot cheaper.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this seems to oversimplify the problem.
Most frontier Models won't show you their true reasoning, but only a summary.
There is also no reason you can automatically assume the quality and price of the outcome based on the first few reasoning trace summaries.
If you look at the recent model releases, it becomes clear that the trend is that the largest models provide the most cost-effective solutions, because of the massive turn/tool call/reasoning reduction needed to find the solution, compared to cheaper and smaller models.