Reasoning Models in the Landscape

Thinking became a product tier: reasoning variants across the families, the documented effort dials, and when to pay for thought.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The New Tier
2. When to Pay for Thinking
3. The Moving Frontier

Sources

• Qwen3.8-27B model card (Hugging Face)
• DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model card (Hugging Face)
• Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B model card (Hugging Face)
• gpt-oss-120b model card (Hugging Face)
• Mitchell et al. (2018) — Model Cards for Model Reporting