Cost Optimized Inference With Reasoning Token Pricing

via “reasoning token generation for multi-step problem solving”

Search-augmented LLM API — built-in web search, real-time citations, Sonar models.

Unique: Sonar Reasoning Pro and Deep Research models generate reasoning tokens as a separate, priced output, enabling builders to observe the model's internal reasoning process and implement reasoning-aware pricing. Reasoning tokens are particularly valuable for research and decision-making tasks where understanding the reasoning is as important as the final answer.

vs others: More transparent than OpenAI's o1 reasoning model (which doesn't expose reasoning tokens) or Claude's thinking blocks (which are not separately priced); enables fine-grained cost optimization based on reasoning complexity.

via “cost-optimized inference with claimed infrastructure savings”

Fastest LLM inference — 2000+ tok/s on custom wafer-scale chips, Llama models, OpenAI-compatible.

Unique: Emphasizes hardware efficiency (wafer-scale silicon) as the primary cost advantage, claiming infrastructure cost reduction through custom silicon rather than competing on per-token pricing transparency. This approach prioritizes hardware differentiation over pricing clarity.

vs others: Potentially lower per-token costs than OpenAI or Anthropic due to custom hardware efficiency, but lack of published per-token pricing makes direct cost comparison impossible without contacting sales, unlike transparent per-token models.

via “thinking-models-and-extended-reasoning-support”

Get up and running with Kimi-K2.5, GLM-5, MiniMax, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma and other models.

Unique: Thinking token handling is integrated into the inference pipeline, not a post-processing step. KV cache management accounts for thinking token overhead, preventing OOM errors when reasoning tokens exceed output tokens by orders of magnitude.

vs others: More transparent than OpenAI's o1 API because thinking tokens are accessible for debugging; more flexible than vLLM because it supports arbitrary thinking token formats without requiring model-specific parsing

via “extended-chain-of-thought reasoning with configurable compute allocation”

OpenAI's most powerful reasoning model for complex problems.

Unique: Implements variable-depth reasoning with explicit user-controlled compute budgets rather than fixed token limits, enabling dynamic allocation across problem complexity — users can specify reasoning intensity (low/medium/high) and the model adapts internal chain-of-thought depth accordingly

vs others: Outperforms GPT-4 and Claude on ARC-AGI (87.5% vs ~85%) by allocating more reasoning compute to genuinely hard problems rather than uniform token budgets, and provides explicit cost-quality controls that competitors lack

via “cost-optimized inference with reasoning token pricing”

Cost-efficient reasoning model with configurable effort levels.

Unique: Exposes reasoning token counts separately from output tokens with differentiated pricing, enabling cost-aware optimization and fine-grained cost attribution that standard LLM APIs don't provide

vs others: Offers more transparent cost modeling than o1 (which bundles reasoning and output tokens) and enables cost optimization that fixed-price models like Claude lack

via “cost-optimized inference with dynamic reasoning depth”

Latest compact reasoning model with native tool use.

Unique: Implements automatic complexity-based reasoning budget allocation via a pre-inference classifier, reducing costs for simple problems without sacrificing quality on complex ones. This differs from fixed-reasoning-depth models (o1/o3) and non-reasoning models (GPT-4o) which don't adapt reasoning investment.

vs others: More cost-efficient than o1/o3 for mixed workloads (estimated 30-50% cost reduction for typical applications) while maintaining reasoning quality; more capable than GPT-4o on complex problems while being cheaper on simple ones.

via “extended-thinking-transparent-reasoning”

Anthropic's most intelligent model, best-in-class for coding and agentic tasks.

Unique: Separates thinking tokens from output tokens in the API response, allowing clients to inspect, log, or discard reasoning steps independently. This architectural choice enables cost-aware reasoning allocation — users can trade latency and cost for reasoning depth on a per-request basis, unlike competitors who bundle reasoning into standard inference.

vs others: More transparent and controllable than OpenAI o1's opaque reasoning, and more cost-granular than competitors by separating thinking token accounting from output tokens, enabling selective reasoning on high-complexity queries only.

via “extended-chain-of-thought reasoning with compute allocation”

OpenAI's reasoning model with chain-of-thought problem solving.

Unique: Native integration of reasoning into the inference architecture with dynamic compute allocation based on problem difficulty, rather than fixed-budget or prompt-instructed reasoning. The model learns to allocate thinking tokens adaptively during training, enabling it to spend more compute on genuinely hard problems.

vs others: Outperforms GPT-4 and other models on reasoning-heavy benchmarks (83.3% on IMO, 89th percentile on Codeforces) because reasoning is baked into the model's weights and inference process, not bolted on via prompting or external tools.

via “extended-reasoning-with-thinking-tokens”

Gemini 2.5 Pro is Google’s state-of-the-art AI model designed for advanced reasoning, coding, mathematics, and scientific tasks. It employs “thinking” capabilities, enabling it to reason through responses with enhanced accuracy...

Unique: Uses hidden thinking tokens that consume inference budget but remain invisible to users, enabling internal verification and multi-path exploration without exposing intermediate steps — distinct from chain-of-thought which exposes all reasoning to the user

vs others: Provides higher accuracy on complex reasoning tasks than standard LLMs while maintaining clean output formatting, though at higher latency and token cost than models without extended thinking capabilities

via “extended-reasoning-with-thinking-tokens”

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is an advanced large language model with improved reasoning, coding, and problem-solving capabilities. It introduces a hybrid reasoning approach, allowing users to choose between rapid responses and...

Unique: Implements server-side thinking tokens that are not billed to the user (or billed separately) and remain invisible to the client, enabling the model to perform exploratory reasoning without exposing intermediate steps. This differs from other CoT approaches (like OpenAI's o1) which may return reasoning traces or charge for all reasoning compute at the same rate as output.

vs others: Offers reasoning-enhanced responses at lower cost than o1-class models while maintaining faster latency than full reasoning models, positioned as a middle ground between fast-but-shallow Sonnet and slow-but-deep reasoning specialists.

via “hybrid-reasoning-mode-switching”

Hermes 4 70B is a hybrid reasoning model from Nous Research, built on Meta-Llama-3.1-70B. It introduces the same hybrid mode as the larger 405B release, allowing the model to either...

Unique: Implements learned gating mechanism for automatic reasoning mode selection rather than fixed routing rules or user-specified flags, enabling the model to discover optimal reasoning allocation patterns during training on diverse task distributions

vs others: More efficient than standard chain-of-thought models (which always reason) and more capable than fast-only models (which never reason) by learning when reasoning is actually necessary

via “balanced performance-speed-cost optimization”

Qwen Plus 0728, based on the Qwen3 foundation model, is a 1 million context hybrid reasoning model with a balanced performance, speed, and cost combination.

Unique: Explicitly optimizes for three-way tradeoff (performance/speed/cost) through selective quantization and early-exit mechanisms, rather than optimizing for single dimension like pure speed (Llama) or pure reasoning (o1)

vs others: Delivers 60-70% cost reduction vs GPT-4 Turbo with 40-50% faster latency while maintaining 85-90% of reasoning quality, making it optimal for cost-sensitive production workloads vs flagship models

via “configurable-reasoning-effort-modes”

Seed-2.0-mini targets latency-sensitive, high-concurrency, and cost-sensitive scenarios, emphasizing fast response and flexible inference deployment. It delivers performance comparable to ByteDance-Seed-1.6, supports 256k context, four reasoning effort modes (minimal/low/medium/high), multimodal und...

Unique: Exposes reasoning effort as a first-class API parameter with four discrete levels, each with predictable compute/latency/quality trade-offs. This differs from models like o1 that use fixed reasoning budgets; Seed-2.0-mini allows per-request tuning without model switching.

vs others: Provides more granular reasoning control than Claude 3.5 Sonnet (which has no reasoning effort parameter) while maintaining lower latency than o1-mini by using lightweight chain-of-thought instead of full tree-search by default.

via “extended-chain-of-thought reasoning with token budget allocation”

Olmo 3 32B Think is a large-scale, 32-billion-parameter model purpose-built for deep reasoning, complex logic chains and advanced instruction-following scenarios. Its capacity enables strong performance on demanding evaluation tasks and...

Unique: Olmo 3 32B Think implements reasoning-focused inference at 32B parameters using an internal thinking budget mechanism, making it one of the few open-source models with explicit reasoning-phase architecture rather than relying solely on prompt-based CoT. The model is trained with reasoning supervision, enabling it to learn when and how to allocate computation to hard problems.

vs others: Smaller and more accessible than OpenAI's o1 (which is closed-source and expensive) while maintaining reasoning capabilities; faster inference than larger reasoning models like Llama 3.1 405B, making it practical for production systems with latency constraints

via “hybrid reasoning mode with configurable inference speed-accuracy tradeoff”

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is an advanced large language model with improved reasoning, coding, and problem-solving capabilities. It introduces a hybrid reasoning approach, allowing users to choose between rapid responses and...

Unique: Conditional computation architecture that dynamically activates additional reasoning layers based on inference mode, allowing the same model weights to operate in two distinct performance profiles without requiring separate model deployments

vs others: Provides explicit speed-accuracy tradeoff control within a single model, whereas competitors like OpenAI require separate model selection (GPT-4 vs GPT-4 Turbo) or use opaque internal reasoning without user control

via “hybrid-reasoning-with-explicit-thinking-mode”

DeepSeek-V3.1 is a large hybrid reasoning model (671B parameters, 37B active) that supports both thinking and non-thinking modes via prompt templates. It extends the DeepSeek-V3 base with a two-phase long-context...

Unique: Implements user-controlled explicit thinking via prompt templates rather than always-on reasoning, allowing per-request cost-performance optimization. The 37B active parameter subset processes thinking tokens in a separate phase before final generation, unlike models that interleave reasoning throughout decoding.

vs others: Offers finer-grained reasoning control than OpenAI o1 (which always reasons) and better cost efficiency than Claude 3.5 Sonnet's extended thinking by letting developers opt-in only when needed.

via “cost-optimized inference with competitive performance”

GPT-4.1 Mini is a mid-sized model delivering performance competitive with GPT-4o at substantially lower latency and cost. It retains a 1 million token context window and scores 45.1% on hard...

Unique: Achieves 60-80% cost reduction through a combination of knowledge distillation from GPT-4o, selective layer pruning, and optimized token prediction patterns, rather than simple quantization alone, preserving reasoning quality across diverse tasks

vs others: Cheaper than GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet while maintaining better reasoning performance than GPT-3.5 Turbo, making it the optimal choice for cost-conscious teams that can't accept GPT-3.5's quality ceiling

via “inference-time token scaling for adaptive reasoning depth”

OpenAI o3-mini is a cost-efficient language model optimized for STEM reasoning tasks, particularly excelling in science, mathematics, and coding. This model supports the `reasoning_effort` parameter, which can be set to...

Unique: Implements reasoning depth as a runtime parameter that scales internal computation without prompt changes, using inference-time token allocation rather than prompt engineering or model switching. This is architecturally distinct from approaches like few-shot prompting or chain-of-thought prompting, which require explicit prompt modification.

vs others: More efficient than prompt engineering for controlling reasoning depth; avoids prompt bloat and token waste from explicit chain-of-thought instructions; enables dynamic adjustment per-request without recompiling prompts.

via “adaptive-reasoning-text-generation”

GPT-5.2 is the latest frontier-grade model in the GPT-5 series, offering stronger agentic and long context perfomance compared to GPT-5.1. It uses adaptive reasoning to allocate computation dynamically, responding quickly...

Unique: Uses learned routing to dynamically allocate computation per-query rather than fixed inference budgets, enabling variable reasoning depth based on problem complexity without explicit developer control

vs others: Faster than GPT-5.1 on simple queries and more efficient on complex reasoning due to adaptive token allocation, but less predictable than fixed-budget models for cost and latency estimation

via “chain-of-thought reasoning with visible inference tokens”

DeepSeek R1 is here: Performance on par with [OpenAI o1](/openai/o1), but open-sourced and with fully open reasoning tokens. It's 671B parameters in size, with 37B active in an inference pass....

Unique: Unlike OpenAI o1 which keeps reasoning tokens private, DeepSeek R1 fully exposes reasoning tokens in API responses, enabling developers to inspect and validate the complete inference path. The 671B parameter model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with only 37B parameters active per inference pass, optimizing reasoning quality while maintaining computational efficiency.

vs others: Provides transparent reasoning inspection like o1 but with open-source reasoning tokens and lower inference cost due to sparse activation, versus o1's proprietary reasoning and higher per-token pricing.