Test-Time Compute
also: inference-time scaling · reasoning models · thinking tokens
Making a model smarter by letting it think longer at inference — the scaling axis behind o1/R1-class models.
Test-time compute trades inference cycles for quality: longer chains of thought, sampling multiple candidates and voting, search over reasoning paths. Reasoning models (o1, DeepSeek-R1) bake this in — they emit extended “thinking” before answering, and accuracy climbs with thinking budget. It complements train-time scaling: when pretraining gains flatten, spending compute per query is the other lever.