Brown: Reasoning models improve primarily through compute efficiency rather than longer thinking duration
Noam Brown · Scaling Test Time Compute to Multi-Agent Civilizations — Noam Brown, OpenAI · Jun 19, 2025 · at 1:08:26
Noam Brown, an AI researcher at OpenAI, discusses the drivers behind performance gains in test-time compute models like o1 and o3.
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“These models are becoming more efficient in the way they're thinking, as they're able to do more with the same amount of test time compute, and I think that's a very underappreciated point, that it's not just that we're getting these models to think for longer. In fact, if you look at O-three, it's thinking for longer than O-one preview for some questions, but it's not, like, a radical difference, but it's way better. Why? Because it's just, like, becoming better at thinking.”
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