Inference-Time Compute in 2026: The Cost-Per-Answer Spread That Rewrote Production Economics
5 min readThe question engineering teams are now asking is not whether reasoning models work — they do — but whether the cost of inference compute is justified for their specific tasks. The answer is task-class-specific, and the spread is large. A benchmark study published in April 2026 measured cost-per-correct-answer across five frontier models on 900 math, …