Machine Heart
Sep 13, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence
LLM Overthinking Crisis: When Long Reasoning Chains Increase Costs and Degrade Answers
Analysis shows LLM overthinking generates 8x more tokens at 16x cost, triggers negative answer flips after 7,000 tokens, and creates pricing reversals where cheaper models cost more in practice, rooted in inference-time search traps and flawed RL credit assignment.
LLM overthinkingRL credit assignmentchain-of-thought
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