Chat modes

Every message is answered in one of four modes. Change it from the assistant & mode pill next to the composer, or the matching controls at the top of the conversation — see A two-minute tour for exactly where these are.

Mode	What it does
Quick	Fast, conversational replies
Thinking (default)	Deeper reasoning with visible chain-of-thought
Research	Multi-step research across knowledge and the web
Thought Partner	Deepest deliberation — multi-round reasoning

Roughly speaking, each mode down the list trades speed for depth: Quick answers in a couple of seconds; Thinking takes a bit longer to reason things through; Research can take up to about a minute while it works across sources; Thought Partner is the slowest, sometimes a couple of minutes, because it considers your question from a few different angles before settling on an answer.

Note

Most of the time, Thinking — the default — is the right call. Reach for Quick when you just need a fast answer, and Research or Thought Partner when a question is genuinely hard or needs to pull from multiple sources.

If a reply in Thinking, Research, or lower already exists and you want more depth without changing the mode for your whole conversation, use Think Harder on that specific reply instead — see Message actions.