The Illusion of Thinking

Five Apple employes released a paper:

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

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Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

Gary Marcus analyzes the paper here: A knockout blow for LLMs?

LLM “reasoning” is so cooked they turned my name into a verb.

And again today: Five quick updates about that Apple reasoning paper that people can’t stop talking about

The most popular rebuttal was … a joke. Literally.

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