It seems the answer in this article is reasoning models are expensive and they are becoming the norm. Reasoning/chain of thought seem like diminishing returns

It seems the answer in this article is reasoning models are expensive and they are becoming the norm. Reasoning/chain of thought seem like diminishing returns to me and I worry they are a bit of a dead end/local optimum. Reasoning models call the language models tens of times so it will be tens of times less efficient than the underlying language model but the quality is not tens of times better. It also feels finicky to me. The bump from Chat GPT-3 to Chat GPT-4 was a reasonable positive shift across the board. The reasoning models produce answers with a different vibe, maybe better overall but worse at some tasks better at others. I can use O1 at no additional cost so I do use it fairly often but I often consciously opt for 4o either because I prefer the results of the quality boost from O1 isn't worth the wait.