Thinking is expensive. That sounds obvious when the thinker is a human consultant billing by the hour. It sounds less obvious when the thinker is a large reasoning model producing long chains of thought, checking itself, trying another route, doubting the first answer, then generously spending another few thousand tokens to arrive at the same wrong place with better punctuation. ...
Tokens are tiny invoices. One reasoning model writes a long chain-of-thought, checks itself, circles back, restates the same conclusion in a slightly more spiritual tone, and then finally prints an answer. Another model reaches the same answer halfway through but keeps talking because nobody told it that the meter is still running. This is not philosophy. This is unit economics with better typography. ...
The expensive model that thinks less at the wrong moment Tokens are not wisdom. They are rented time. Anyone who has paid for reasoning-model inference already understands the business version of this problem. A model spends hundreds or thousands of tokens circling a simple question, then compresses a genuinely compound task into a suspiciously neat answer. It looks thoughtful. It may even sound disciplined. But the bill arrives in one column and the error arrives in another. ...