Reasoning Model — AI Glossary

A reasoning model is an AI system specifically trained to perform extended, step-by-step thinking before producing a final answer. Unlike standard language models that generate responses token-by-token, reasoning models (like OpenAI's o1/o3 series and DeepSeek-R1) allocate additional compute time to "think" through problems, producing a chain of reasoning steps that leads to more accurate answers on complex tasks.