Is test-time compute a universally defined third scaling law?
The phrase is shorthand used in discussions of AI scaling. There is no mandatory three-part taxonomy or single equation that makes pretraining, post-training and inference interchangeable.
Answered in
Test-Time Compute: What Extra Reasoning, Search and Verification Can BuyInference-time budgets can improve selected reasoning tasks. Search and process rewards are useful methods, not a universal architecture or guarantee.
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