The rise of reasoning models spark new prompting techniques and a debate over cost

The advent of reasoning AI models like OpenAI’s o1 has sparked new discussions about effective prompting techniques and their associated costs.

The evolution of reasoning AI: OpenAI’s o1 model, launched in September 2024, represents a new generation of AI that prioritizes thorough analysis over speed, particularly excelling in complex math and science problems.

• The model employs “chain-of-thought” (CoT) prompting and self-reflection mechanisms to verify its work
• Competitors including DeepSeek’s R1, Google Gemini 2 Flash Thinking, and LlamaV-o1 have emerged with similar reasoning capabilities
• These models intentionally slow down their response time to enable more thorough analysis and verification

Cost considerations: The significant price differential between o1 and traditional language models has raised questions about their value proposition.

• O1 costs $15.00 per million input tokens, compared to GPT-4o‘s $1.25 per million tokens
• The 12x price increase has led to scrutiny of the model’s performance benefits
• Despite the higher costs, a growing number of users are finding value in the enhanced capabilities

New prompting paradigm: Former Apple Interface Designer Ben Hylak has introduced a novel approach to prompting reasoning AI models.

• Instead of traditional prompts, Hylak advocates for writing detailed “briefs” that provide comprehensive context
• Users should focus on explaining what they want rather than how the model should think
• The approach allows the model to leverage its autonomous reasoning capabilities more effectively

Expert validation: Key industry figures have endorsed these new prompting methods.

• OpenAI president Greg Brockman confirmed that o1 requires different usage patterns compared to standard chat models
• Louis Arge, former Teton.ai engineer, has discovered that LLMs respond better to self-generated prompts
• These insights suggest that traditional prompting techniques may need to evolve for newer AI models

Looking ahead: The emergence of reasoning AI models signals a shift in how users should interact with artificial intelligence systems, requiring adaptation in prompting strategies while potentially delivering superior results for complex tasks. The success of these models may ultimately depend on users’ ability to effectively communicate their needs through more detailed and context-rich prompting approaches.