Extended Reasoning With Native Thinking Mode

via “extended reasoning with thinking tokens”

Google's multimodal API — Gemini 2.5 Pro/Flash, 1M context, video understanding, grounding.

Unique: Allocates hidden 'thinking tokens' for internal reasoning before generating output, allowing the model to spend additional computation on difficult problems without exposing reasoning steps to the user

vs others: Similar to OpenAI's o1 extended reasoning, but integrated into the standard Gemini API rather than a separate model, allowing extended reasoning on the same multimodal inputs (images, audio, video) that standard Gemini supports

via “deep thinking mode for complex mathematical and logical reasoning”

Shanghai AI Lab's multilingual foundation model.

Unique: Implements hidden reasoning tokens that don't consume user-visible token budget, allowing extended thinking without inflating output length; trained with only 4 trillion tokens (vs 8T+ for competing models) through efficient reasoning-focused pretraining

vs others: More efficient reasoning than o1-preview (requires fewer total tokens) while maintaining comparable accuracy on math benchmarks; faster than Llama 3.1 with extended thinking due to optimized attention patterns

via “extended thinking with user-controlled reasoning effort”

Anthropic's balanced model for production workloads.

Unique: Implements hybrid reasoning with both user-controlled extended thinking and automatic adaptive thinking, allowing fine-grained effort control via API parameters rather than binary on/off toggle. This dual-mode approach enables cost optimization by letting developers choose reasoning depth per-request while maintaining automatic reasoning for complex queries.

vs others: Offers more granular reasoning control than GPT-4o's reasoning mode (which lacks effort parameters) and lower cost than o1 models while maintaining competitive reasoning performance on complex tasks.

via “extended thinking and reasoning mode for complex problem-solving”

Anthropic's developer console for Claude API.

Unique: Provides access to Claude's internal reasoning process via thinking blocks, allowing developers to inspect and debug Claude's reasoning rather than only seeing final outputs

vs others: More transparent than black-box reasoning in other LLMs, and allows developers to tune reasoning effort via budget parameters

via “native chain-of-thought reasoning with extended thinking”

Google's most capable model with 1M context and native thinking.

Unique: Native thinking is baked into model architecture rather than achieved through prompt engineering; enables 94.3% accuracy on GPQA Diamond (scientific knowledge) without requiring explicit CoT prompting, and 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 abstract reasoning puzzles

vs others: Outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 on reasoning benchmarks (GPQA 94.3% vs Sonnet 89.9%) because thinking is a first-class architectural feature, not a post-hoc prompt technique

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 iterative refinement”

Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

Unique: Opus 4.5 exposes reasoning artifacts as first-class outputs that developers can inspect and interact with, rather than keeping reasoning internal — this enables debugging, validation, and guided refinement of agent decision-making in ways previous models obscured

vs others: Differs from standard LLM agents by making reasoning transparent and inspectable rather than treating it as a black box, enabling developers to understand failure modes and guide the model toward better solutions

via “extended-thinking code reasoning for complex problem-solving”

The frontier coding agent.

Unique: Explicitly exposes extended thinking as a selectable mode ('deep') within the agent, allowing developers to opt-in to slower but more thorough reasoning for complex problems. This is distinct from tools that use extended thinking transparently or not at all.

vs others: Provides explicit control over reasoning depth (smart/rush/deep modes) whereas Copilot uses a single model per request, and Cursor requires separate configuration or prompting to trigger deeper reasoning.

via “reasoning-model-support-with-extended-thinking”

Chat via OpenAI-Compatible API

Unique: Transparently supports reasoning models (o1, o3-mini, DeepSeek R1) with extended thinking capabilities, routing complex problems to models optimized for deep reasoning; handles different token accounting and response time characteristics

vs others: Enables access to state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities without custom integration; more cost-effective than running reasoning models locally; better for complex problems than standard fast models

Gemini 2.5 Flash is Google's state-of-the-art workhorse model, specifically designed for advanced reasoning, coding, mathematics, and scientific tasks. It includes built-in "thinking" capabilities, enabling it to provide responses with greater...

Unique: Integrates reasoning as a first-class inference primitive rather than a prompt engineering technique, using an internal thinking phase that explores solution spaces before output generation, with separate token accounting for transparency

vs others: Provides more reliable reasoning than prompt-based CoT approaches (like o1-preview) while maintaining faster inference than full-chain reasoning models, with explicit visibility into thinking token usage

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

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: Implements internalized thinking as part of the inference architecture rather than exposing chain-of-thought tokens, allowing the model to reason without token overhead while maintaining response quality. Uses adaptive computation allocation to balance reasoning depth with response latency based on problem complexity.

vs others: Provides reasoning benefits of extended chain-of-thought without the token cost and latency of explicit reasoning tokens, differentiating it from models like o1 that expose reasoning in the output stream.

via “extended thinking reasoning with step-by-step problem decomposition”

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: Implements native extended thinking as a first-class capability integrated into the model architecture, allowing transparent reasoning-before-response without requiring prompt engineering or external chain-of-thought frameworks. The thinking process is computationally budgeted and automatically triggered based on query complexity.

vs others: Provides reasoning capabilities comparable to o1 but with broader multimodal support (image/audio inputs) and lower per-token cost than specialized reasoning models, though with less user control over reasoning depth.

via “long-context reasoning with extended thinking”

Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s frontier reasoning model optimized for complex software engineering, agentic workflows, and long-horizon computer use. It offers strong multimodal capabilities, competitive performance across real-world coding and...

Unique: Implements internal chain-of-thought reasoning within a 200K token window using transformer attention mechanisms, allowing reasoning to occur before output generation without requiring explicit prompt engineering for step-by-step thinking

vs others: Outperforms GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on complex reasoning tasks by maintaining coherence across longer reasoning chains while keeping the 200K context window practical for real-world applications

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 “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 “extended-chain-of-thought reasoning with explicit thinking tokens”

Qwen3-Max-Thinking is the flagship reasoning model in the Qwen3 series, designed for high-stakes cognitive tasks that require deep, multi-step reasoning. By significantly scaling model capacity and reinforcement learning compute, it...

Unique: Uses dedicated thinking token architecture with RL-optimized allocation strategy, allowing the model to dynamically determine reasoning depth per query rather than applying fixed reasoning budgets like some competitors. Separates internal deliberation from output generation at the token level, enabling transparent reasoning traces.

vs others: Provides deeper, more transparent reasoning than standard LLMs while maintaining faster inference than some reasoning-specialized models by using learned heuristics to allocate thinking compute only when needed.

via “reasoning-augmented text generation with explicit thinking mode”

Qwen3-8B is a dense 8.2B parameter causal language model from the Qwen3 series, designed for both reasoning-heavy tasks and efficient dialogue. It supports seamless switching between "thinking" mode for math,...

Unique: Implements explicit thinking mode as a native architectural feature rather than prompt-engineering workaround, using token-level gating to separate reasoning computation from response generation within a single 8B parameter model

vs others: Achieves reasoning performance comparable to 70B+ models while maintaining 8B parameter efficiency through dedicated thinking tokens, unlike Llama or Mistral which require larger model sizes or external chain-of-thought prompting

via “complex reasoning and chain-of-thought decomposition”

Command R7B (12-2024) is a small, fast update of the Command R+ model, delivered in December 2024. It excels at RAG, tool use, agents, and similar tasks requiring complex reasoning...

Unique: Command R7B's reasoning is optimized for RAG and tool-use contexts, where intermediate steps can reference retrieved documents or tool outputs, enabling grounded reasoning that combines external knowledge with logical inference

vs others: Outperforms GPT-4 on MATH and AIME benchmarks when combined with tool use for calculation, because it can delegate computation to tools rather than attempting symbolic math in-context

via “extended reasoning with chain-of-thought for complex visual tasks”

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking is a multimodal model that unifies strong text generation with visual understanding for images and videos. Its Thinking variant enhances reasoning in STEM, math, and complex tasks. It excels...

Unique: Integrates extended reasoning directly into the model's forward pass for visual tasks, rather than using post-hoc prompting techniques like 'think step-by-step', enabling the model to allocate compute dynamically to reasoning-heavy visual problems

vs others: More reliable than prompt-based chain-of-thought for visual reasoning because reasoning is baked into model weights, not dependent on prompt engineering; produces more consistent intermediate steps for STEM tasks

via “extended-reasoning-chain-of-thought-generation”

o3 is a well-rounded and powerful model across domains. It sets a new standard for math, science, coding, and visual reasoning tasks. It also excels at technical writing and instruction-following....

Unique: Implements internal extended thinking with computational budget allocation — the model allocates more inference compute to reasoning phases before answer generation, unlike standard LLMs that generate reasoning and answers in a single forward pass. This is achieved through a two-phase architecture where reasoning tokens are generated in a hidden reasoning phase before final output.

vs others: Outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 on math olympiad problems and complex reasoning tasks by 15-40% due to extended thinking budget, but at significantly higher latency and cost than standard models