Deep Cogito emerges from stealth with hybrid AI ‘reasoning’ models

Summary

A new company, Deep Cogito, has emerged from stealth with a family of openly available AI models that can be switched between “reasoning” and non-reasoning modes. Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 have shown great promise in domains like math and physics, thanks to their ability to effectively fact-check themselves by working through complex problems step by step. This reasoning comes at a cost, however: higher computing and latency. That’s why labs like Anthropic are pursuing “hybrid” model architectures that combine reasoning components with standard, non-reasoning elements. Hybrid models can quickly answer simple questions while spending additional time considering more challenging queries. All of Deep Cogito’s models, called Cogito 1, are hybrid models. Cogito claims that they outperform the best open models of the same size, including models from Meta and Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. “Each model can answer directly […] or self-reflect before answering (like reasoning models),” the company explained in a blog post. “[All] were developed by a small team in approximately 75 days.” The Cogito 1 models range from 3 billion parameters to 70 billion parameters, and Cogito says that models ranging up to 671 billion parameters will join them in the coming weeks and months. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, with more parameters generally being better. Cogito 1 wasn’t developed from scratch, to be clear. Deep Cogito built on top of Meta’s open Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen models to create its own. The company says that it applied novel training approaches to boost the base models’ performance and enable toggleable reasoning. According to the results of Cogito’s internal benchmarking, the largest Cogito 1 model, Cogito 70B, with reasoning outperforms DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model on a few mathematics and language evaluations. Cogito 70B with reasoning disabled also eclipses Meta’s recently released Llama 4 Scout model on LiveBench, a general-pu...