Who Should Set the Thinking Depth? Reddit Debates Handing Reasoning Budgets to Models
FearOfEleven · reddit · 2026-11-05
A Reddit discussion asks whether users should keep manually selecting "thinking depth" (as offered in the Gemini app and Hermes agent) or let models decide for themselves. Setting depth too high already causes overthinking, circular loops, and negative flips.
The author's thought experiment: with zero budget or latency constraints and accuracy as the only goal, models surpassing humans analytically should judge a task's epistemological and procedural difficulty better than the requester. The model could even assess the task first and briefly propose the depth it needs.
Core questions raised: does the manual selector amount to an admission that training models to reliably estimate when their reasoning will converge remains unsolved — or is there a deeper architectural reason an AI should never decide its own depth of thought?
More from AGI Musings
- If your decision theory says voting is useless, it may not be good decision theory — JeffLadish · 2026-11-05
- AI video imagines year 2126: monopoly, containment or abundance after labor — No_Twist_678 · 2026-11-05
- AI2 exec Bindu Reddy: AI's reputation is unfairly bad and the industry should celebrate it — bindureddy · 2026-11-05
- Many grant solicitations now flagged as 100% AI-generated by detector Pangram — analisereal · 2026-11-05
- Why AI research keeps looking under the lamppost: stale problem frames inherited from Kant — fkasummer · 2026-11-05
- Michael Nielsen on why scientists can't tell an anomaly from a revolution — michael_nielsen · 2026-11-05