This is an active research topic - two papers on this have come out over the last few days, one cutting half of the tokens and actually boosting performance overall.

I'd hazard a guess that they could get another 40% reduction, if they can come up with better reasoning scaffolding.

Each advance over the last 4 years, from RLHF to o1 reasoning to multi-agent, multi-cluster parallelized CoT, has resulted in a new engineering scope, and the low hanging fruit in each place gets explored over the course of 8-12 months. We still probably have a year or 2 of low hanging fruit and hacking on everything htat makes up current frontier models.

It'll be interesting if there's any architectural upsets in the near future. All the money and time invested into transformers could get ditched in favor of some other new king of the hill(climbers).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02828 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16419 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05988

Current LLMs are going to get really sleek and highly tuned, but I have a feeling they're going to be relegated to a component status, or maybe even abandoned when the next best thing comes along and blows the performance away.