A video transcript excerpt discussing the UX and product-design challenges when deploying a reasoning-capable model that needs noticeable time to 'think.' The speaker contrasts very long background reasoning (minutes) with intermediate waits (10–25 seconds) and explains why fully exposing internal chain-of-thought or leaving users idle are poor UI choices; instead they implemented lightweight progress-updates.
Chapters
When we were first launching our reasoning model, we were the first to build a model that could reason. Instead of giving you just a quick, you know, system one answer right away to every question you asked, you could ask it hard questions and it would reason the same way that if I asked you to do a crossword puzzle, you couldn't just, like, snap fill in everything. This reasoning breakthrough was big, but it was also the first time that a model needed to sit and think. And that's a weird paradigm for consumer product. You don't normally have something where you might need to hang out for 25 seconds after you ask a question. And so we were trying to figure out, you know, what's the UI for this? With deep research, where the model is going to go and think for 25 minutes. Sometimes it's actually not that hard because you're not going to sit and watch it for 25 minutes. You're going to go do something else. You're going to go to another tab or go get lunch or whatever, and then you'll come back and it's done. When it's like 20, 25 seconds or 10 seconds, it's a long time to wait, but it's not long enough to go do something else. You can think. Like, if you asked me something that I needed to think for 20 seconds to answer, or what would I do? I wouldn't just, like, go mute and not say anything and kind of shut down for 20 seconds and then come back. So we shouldn't do that. We shouldn't just, like, have a slider sitting there. That's annoying. But I also wouldn't just start, like, babbling every single thought that I had. So we probably shouldn't just, like, expose the whole chain of thought as the model's thinking. But, you know, I might go like, huh, That's a good question. All right. I might approach it like that and then think, you know, you're sort of like, maybe giving little updates, and that's actually what we ended up shipping.
