SecondSourceJudgment rebuilt from primary sources
Expert takes · Jul 19, 2026

Sebastian Raschka (author of several machine-learning textbooks, runs the Ahead of AI newsletter), July 18.

Expert takes

From the Jul 19, 2026 daily brief

He went through six open-weight models' technical reports side by side and found that the training recipe for adjustable reasoning effort — letting the user decide how long and how deep the model thinks before answering — has converged on the same three-stage framework, officially graduating from research feature to factory standard (original). One concrete number: Kimi's approach cuts generation volume by about 25–30% on its own models while scores barely move on Kimi's own, unnamed internal evals (as relayed by Raschka). This supports the judgment line behind our July 16 issue on OpenAI pricing its new generation 2x higher: model capability and cost are increasingly set by how much compute goes in at inference time. "How big is the model" and "how long does it think" are now two independent procurement knobs — a small model on high effort can sometimes match a big one. Caveat: his survey spans six primary reports, but for this brief it is still a single source, and the specific numbers await checks against each original report.

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