Loading timeline…
20252020s
The Inference Scaling Law
2025 established that capability keeps rising with inference compute — and repriced what serving a model costs.
Why It Mattered
The year turned thinking-time from a research result into an economic fact. Providers began selling reasoning budgets explicitly, and the cost of an answer became a function of how long the model was allowed to think — a different curve from the training-scale laws that governed the previous decade.
Who Built It
OpenAI / Anthropic
Applications
- Science
- Math
- Architecture