Think Twice, Pay Once: The New Economics of Long-Horizon AI Reasoning
Opening — Why this matters now AI reasoning has entered its awkward managerial phase. For the past two years, the dominant story has been simple enough for a conference keynote: make models reason longer, use reinforcement learning, scale inference-time computation, and let the model “think.” The story is not wrong. It is just incomplete in the same way that saying “hire more analysts” is an incomplete operating model for a research department. More thinking can help. It can also become expensive, slow, noisy, and occasionally theatrical. ...