#deep thinking tokens

An editorial illustration showing an AI neural network tangled in its own thought chains, with glowing reasoning paths that loop back on themselves and a simple correct answer sitting just out of reach, rendered in deep indigo and warm amber tones

July 10, 2026

LLMs Can Think Too Much — And It's Making Them Wrong

The AI field spent two years proving that longer reasoning chains produce better answers. Now a wave of new research shows the opposite: beyond a certain point, more 'thinking' actively degrades performance. The overthinking problem is real, measurable, and it's forcing a rethink of how we deploy reasoning models.

LLM reasoningtest-time computeoverthinking