What is a reasoning model? How it differs from standard LLMs, how Chain-of-Thought works, and how to compare o1, DeepSeek-R1, Qwen 3 & top models of 2026.

From the release of DeepSeek R1, distillation in reasoning models have become one of the most common techniques in frontier AI.

What is a reasoning model? How it differs from standard LLMs, how Chain-of-Thought works, and how to compare o1, DeepSeek-R1, Qwen 3 & top models of 2026.