AI & LLMs

Effort Level

also: reasoning effort · thinking budget

A control that sets how much reasoning or compute a model spends before answering — usually low, medium or high.

An effort level exposes test-time compute as a knob: higher effort lets a reasoning model think longer — more internal steps or tokens — before it responds, trading latency and cost for accuracy on hard problems. It lets a single model serve both quick, cheap answers and slow, careful ones.