Get ready for 'long thinking,' artificial intelligence's next leap forward

Nvidia's chief executive made a passing reference late in the company's most recent earnings call that deserves much more attention than it got—even if it was understandably overshadowed by $35.1 billion in quarterly revenue, driven 94% higher by customers' ravenous demand for AI chips.

- Steven Rosenbush

"We're in the beginnings of this generative AI revolution as we all know," Jensen Huang said on the call. "And we're at the beginning of a new generation of foundation models that are able to do reasoning and able to do long thinking."

"Long thinking" didn't make it into the zeitgeist when OpenAI's ChatGPT first stunned the world two years ago with rapid replies to questions about almost anything. But it has the potential to reduce or eliminate the errors that frequently peppered those responses.

The idea is just what it sounds like, at least at the highest level: Long-thinking AI models are designed to take more time to "think over" the results they generate for us. They will be intelligent enough to give us updates on their progress and ask us for feedback along the way.

That can mean spending a few more seconds on a problem—or much, much longer, as Huang indicated in another telling remark last June.

"In many cases, as you know, we're now working on artificial intelligence applications that run for 100 days," he said at the Computex trade show in Taipei.

As the models' reasoning ability develops, AI is expected to evolve far beyond the current tech that works on our behalf in customer service or automation, or the even more sophisticated agents that are just beginning to appear.