It seems like playing with reasoning will be enormously useful in improving the capability of models.
In the earlier micro-era of LLMs it was all about the scale of how much world knowledge you could cram in.
It feels like we've topped out on that, and now the new micro-era of competition is extracting as much power out of reasoning.
This is a distillation exercise, but also a UX and tinkering challenge.
Reasoning currently is not great; it often comes back to the wrong point multiple times before breaking through.
OpenAI tried to keep the reasoning tokens as proprietary advantage.
But it turns out it was extremely easy to copy.
Now they're on a tech island.
OpenAI has only a few hundred employees to tinker and come up with ideas of how to get models to reason better.
DeepSeek and other open-ish alternatives can benefit from the exploratory capability of the entire ecosystem.
We seem like we're just now entering the Cambrian explosion micro-era for the model layer.