Overthinking Bench: Claude burns 1,069 thinking tokens on 'is the globe round?'

intellectronica · x · 2026-11-04

Peter Gostev's 'Overthinking Bench' asks simple questions and counts thinking tokens at lowest and highest effort (5 runs each). Results vary wildly: Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-6 Astra use zero thinking tokens at low effort for small talk and 2+2, but at max effort Claude spends 1,069 tokens on whether the globe is round and Gemini 662. Grok 4.7 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash always think a little (30-60 tokens even at low effort), while Kimi K3.1 Pro shows almost no gap between effort levels.

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