Reasoning model doesn't imply tool calling – those shouldn't be conflated. Reasoning just means more implicit chain-of-thought. It can be emulated by non reaso

Reasoning model doesn't imply tool calling – those shouldn't be conflated. Reasoning just means more implicit chain-of-thought. It can be emulated by non reasoning model by explicitly constructing prompt to perform longer step by step thought process. With reasoning models it just happens implicitly, some models allow for control over reasoning effort with special tokens. Those models are simply fine tuned to do it themselves without explicit dialogue from the user. Tool calling happens primarily on the client side. Research/web access mode etc made available by some providers (based on tool calling that they handle themselves) is not a property of a model, can be enabled on any model. Nothing plateaued from where I'm standing – new models are being trained, releases happen frequently with impressive integration speed. New models outperform previous ones. Models gain multi modality etc. Regarding alternative architectures – there are new ones proposed all the time. It's not easy to verify all of them at scale. Some ideas that are extending current state of art architectures end up in frontier models - but it takes time to train so lag does exist. There are also a lot of improvements that are hidden from public by commercial companies.