{"type":"post","id":"how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68","slug":"how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68","title":"How Much Does Reasoning Effort Affect Score and Cost?","description":"Vals AI compared three reasoning settings across seven frontier models and eight benchmarks, finding that lower settings often cut run cost much more than they reduce benchmark score.","retrieval_nugget":"Vals AI compared three reasoning settings across seven frontier models and eight benchmarks, finding that lower settings often cut run cost much more than they reduce benchmark score. The results support testing reasoning effort per task rather than defaulting to maximum, but do not establish a universally best setting.","published_at":"2026-11-04","updated_at":"2026-11-06","record_date":"2026-11-04","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["gemini","claude"],"entities":["Vals AI","DeepSeek V4.1 Flash","Grok 4.7","Muse Spark 1.3","GPT-6 Astra","Claude Opus 5.5","GLM-5.3","Gemini 4 Argon"],"related_patterns":["agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"Vals AI reports a separate seven-model benchmark: four models retained at least 80% of score for half the cost or less, and lower settings matched leaderboard scores in 22 of 56 model-benchmark combinations.","prior_refs":["https://newruntime.com/posts/what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045/"],"source_url":"https://www.vals.ai/blogs/reasoning-effort","source_urls":["https://www.vals.ai/blogs/reasoning-effort"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-much-does-reasoning-effort-affect-score-and-b03b68.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/gemini/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/gemini/","title":"Gemini","reason":"Explore the gemini topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/gemini.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/gemini.json"},{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/claude/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/claude/","title":"Claude","reason":"Explore the claude topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/claude.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/claude.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}