Test-time compute
Letting a model think longer when answering, instead of only training it bigger.
capabilityBuilt today Open on the map →
Facts
- Lane
- Algorithms and learning
- Wave
- 4 of 12 (build order, not a date)
- Needs
- 7 boxes all the way back through hard links
- Unlocks
- 61 boxes downstream through hard links
- Leverage
- None: already built
- Cluster
- Science and medicine
Evidence as of October 2026
As gains from bigger pretraining runs slowed in late 2024, labs turned to reasoning at inference time. OpenAI’s Noam Brown said 20 seconds of thinking in a poker hand matched scaling the model up 100,000 times.
Around it
Needs · 1
Unlocks · 1