On Thinking “A key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free ( or at a great price ). ” Sam Altman , “GPT-4o” (2024) “Thinking is solved!” a friend of mine blurted out after a swarm of AI agents took off building at the Oxford ETH hackathon, late 2025. The Republic 1 , a peer-reviewing intelligence platform with an AI engine, could be built in just a few days with Opus 4.6. Fact-checking papers with AI could be completed in a few hours. The project itself stood as a hypothesis of how AI could deliberate intellectually, process arguments, and self-reflect on the claims of research papers. What started off as a hackathon project has, as of now, been validated by systems like the AI Scientist 2 and Google DeepMind’s Co-scientist 3 . Beyond autonomous research, AI is often used as a high-level thinking assistant: Terence Tao suggests it may advance experimental mathematics 4 , models have captured headlines solving Erdős problems, and it has become a routine tool in protein structure prediction. There is no shortage of discussion on the superb capabilities of these tools. LLMs now simulate complex thinking, including research, brainstorming, and synthesis. Frontier models can handle long-form tasks, complex problem-solving, and areas involving some human judgement. But better models also fetch higher prices 5 , with Claude Fable priced at $50/Mtok per output, ten times the rate of a weaker model like Haiku 4.5. I want to look at this tre…

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