Mitchell: LLMs allocate compute efficiently by deferring tasks to specialized tools
Eric Mitchell · No Priors Ep. 138 | The Best of 2025 (So Far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil · Oct 31, 2025 · at 12:28
Eric Mitchell was not on this episode. A recording of them was played into it, so these are their words but not an appearance on No Priors. It still counts as said, and it is kept out of every score on their page.
OpenAI researcher Eric Mitchell explains why reasoning models write and execute code rather than computing calculations within their context window.
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“I think, like, part of this is you can just allocate compute a lot more efficiently because you can defer stuff that the model doesn't have comparative advantage to doing to a tool that is, like, really well suited to doing that thing.”
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