Test-Time Compute
Test-time compute as a second scaling axis. The three levers—more steps, more candidates and more structure—and their quality, cost and latency tradeoffs in reasoning models.
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The ideas to retain
1. What test-time compute is and why it matters
For a long time, the main known lever for improving an LLM was training scale: more parameters, more data and more training compute. The original scaling-law work (Kaplan et al., 2020)…
2. The three levers
There are three principal mechanisms for translating additional inference compute into better answers.
Lever 1: More internal steps
Chain-of-thought (Wei et al., 2022) is the most direct mechanism. Instead of producing the final answer immediately, the model first generates a sequence of intermediate steps that…
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