Why it matters

Test-time compute reshapes inference. Understanding shapes modern models.

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The architecture

Longer reasoning chains.

Sample many + best-of-N.

Self-consistency vote.

Test-time compute approachesLonger CoTextended reasoningBest-of-Nsample + scoreSelf-consistencymajority voteo1 + DeepSeek R1 established RL-trained CoT reasoning at inference scale
Test-time compute.
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How it works end to end

Reasoning tokens: hidden CoT.

Sample N: pick best.

Verifier scoring.

Cost scales with quality.