Two years into the Generative AI revolution, research is progressing the field from “thinking fast”—rapid-fire pre-trained responses—to “thinking slow”— reasoning at inference time.
This evolution is unlocking a new cohort of agentic applications.
The focus is shifting to the development and scaling of the reasoning layer, where “System 2” thinking takes precedence. Inspired by models like AlphaGo, this layer aims to endow AI systems with deliberate reasoning, problem-solving and cognitive operations at inference time that go beyond rapid pattern matching.
And new cognitive architectures and user interfaces are shaping how these reasoning capabilities are delivered to and interact with users.