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Apple’s machine-learning group set off a rhetorical firestorm earlier this month with its launch of “The Illusion of Thinking,” a 53-page analysis paper arguing that so-called massive reasoning fashions (LRMs) or reasoning massive language fashions (reasoning LLMs) equivalent to OpenAI’s “o” sequence and Google’s Gemini-2.5 Professional and Flash Considering don’t really have interaction in unbiased “pondering” or “reasoning” from generalized first rules realized from their coaching knowledge.
As a substitute, the authors contend, these reasoning LLMs are literally performing a sort of “sample matching” and their obvious reasoning skill appears to crumble as soon as a job turns into too advanced, suggesting that their structure and efficiency shouldn’t be a viable path to enhancing generative AI to the purpose that it’s synthetic generalized intelligence (AGI), which OpenAI defines as a mannequin that outperforms people at most economically beneficial work, or superintelligence, AI even smarter than human beings can comprehend.
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Unsurprisingly, the paper instantly circulated broadly among the many machine studying neighborhood on X and lots of readers’ preliminary reactions have been to declare that Apple had successfully disproven a lot of the hype round this class of AI: “Apple simply proved AI ‘reasoning’ fashions like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don’t really cause in any respect,” declared Ruben Hassid, creator of EasyGen, an LLM-driven LinkedIn publish auto writing software. “They only memorize patterns rather well.”
However now at this time, a new paper has emerged, the cheekily titled “The Illusion of The Illusion of Thinking” — importantly, co-authored by a reasoning LLM itself, Claude Opus 4 and Alex Lawsen, a human being and unbiased AI researcher and technical author — that features many criticisms from the bigger ML neighborhood concerning the paper and successfully argues that the methodologies and experimental designs the Apple Analysis staff used of their preliminary work are basically flawed.
Whereas we right here at VentureBeat usually are not ML researchers ourselves and never ready to say the Apple Researchers are fallacious, the controversy has definitely been a vigorous one and the difficulty concerning the capabilities of LRMs or reasoner LLMs in comparison with human pondering appears removed from settled.
How the Apple Analysis examine was designed — and what it discovered
Utilizing 4 traditional planning issues — Tower of Hanoi, Blocks World, River Crossing and Checkers Leaping — Apple’s researchers designed a battery of duties that pressured reasoning fashions to plan a number of strikes forward and generate full options.
These video games have been chosen for his or her lengthy historical past in cognitive science and AI analysis and their skill to scale in complexity as extra steps or constraints are added. Every puzzle required the fashions to not simply produce an accurate last reply, however to elucidate their pondering alongside the best way utilizing chain-of-thought prompting.
Because the puzzles elevated in issue, the researchers noticed a constant drop in accuracy throughout a number of main reasoning fashions. In probably the most advanced duties, efficiency plunged to zero. Notably, the size of the fashions’ inner reasoning traces—measured by the variety of tokens spent pondering via the issue—additionally started to shrink. Apple’s researchers interpreted this as an indication that the fashions have been abandoning problem-solving altogether as soon as the duties turned too exhausting, primarily “giving up.”
The timing of the paper’s launch, just ahead of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), added to the affect. It rapidly went viral throughout X, the place many interpreted the findings as a high-profile admission that current-generation LLMs are nonetheless glorified autocomplete engines, not general-purpose thinkers. This framing, whereas controversial, drove a lot of the preliminary dialogue and debate that adopted.
Critics take purpose on X
Among the many most vocal critics of the Apple paper was ML researcher and X user @scaling01 (aka “Lisan al Gaib”), who posted a number of threads dissecting the methodology.
In one widely shared post, Lisan argued that the Apple staff conflated token price range failures with reasoning failures, noting that “all fashions can have 0 accuracy with greater than 13 disks just because they can not output that a lot!”
For puzzles like Tower of Hanoi, he emphasised, the output measurement grows exponentially, whereas the LLM context home windows stay fastened, writing “simply because Tower of Hanoi requires exponentially extra steps than the opposite ones, that solely require quadratically or linearly extra steps, doesn’t imply Tower of Hanoi is harder” and convincingly confirmed that fashions like Claude 3 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1 usually produced algorithmically right methods in plain textual content or code—but have been nonetheless marked fallacious.
Another post highlighted that even breaking the duty down into smaller, decomposed steps worsened mannequin efficiency—not as a result of the fashions failed to know, however as a result of they lacked reminiscence of earlier strikes and technique.
“The LLM wants the historical past and a grand technique,” he wrote, suggesting the true drawback was context-window measurement reasonably than reasoning.
I raised another important grain of salt myself on X: Apple by no means benchmarked the mannequin efficiency in opposition to human efficiency on the identical duties. “Am I lacking it, or did you not examine LRMs to human perf[ormance] on [the] similar duties?? If not, how are you aware this similar drop-off in perf doesn’t occur to individuals, too?” I requested the researchers instantly in a thread tagging the paper’s authors. I additionally emailed them about this and lots of different questions, however they’ve but to reply.
Others echoed that sentiment, noting that human drawback solvers additionally falter on lengthy, multistep logic puzzles, particularly with out pen-and-paper instruments or reminiscence aids. With out that baseline, Apple’s declare of a basic “reasoning collapse” feels ungrounded.
A number of researchers additionally questioned the binary framing of the paper’s title and thesis—drawing a tough line between “sample matching” and “reasoning.”
Alexander Doria aka Pierre-Carl Langlais, an LLM coach at vitality environment friendly French AI startup Pleias, mentioned the framing misses the nuance, arguing that fashions may be studying partial heuristics reasonably than merely matching patterns.
Ethan Mollick, the AI targeted professor at College of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Faculty of Enterprise, known as the concept LLMs are “hitting a wall” untimely, likening it to comparable claims about “mannequin collapse” that didn’t pan out.
In the meantime, critics like @arithmoquine have been extra cynical, suggesting that Apple—behind the curve on LLMs in comparison with rivals like OpenAI and Google—may be attempting to decrease expectations,” developing with analysis on “the way it’s all faux and homosexual and doesn’t matter anyway” they quipped, mentioning Apple’s status with now poorly performing AI merchandise like Siri.
Briefly, whereas Apple’s examine triggered a significant dialog about analysis rigor, it additionally uncovered a deep rift over how a lot belief to put in metrics when the take a look at itself may be flawed.
A measurement artifact, or a ceiling?
In different phrases, the fashions could have understood the puzzles however ran out of “paper” to jot down the total answer.
“Token limits, not logic, froze the fashions,” wrote Carnegie Mellon researcher Rohan Paul in a widely shared thread summarizing the follow-up tests.
But not everybody is able to clear LRMs of the cost. Some observers level out that Apple’s examine nonetheless revealed three efficiency regimes — easy duties the place added reasoning hurts, mid-range puzzles the place it helps, and high-complexity circumstances the place each commonplace and “pondering” fashions crater.
Others view the controversy as company positioning, noting that Apple’s personal on-device “Apple Intelligence” fashions path rivals on many public leaderboards.
The rebuttal: “The Phantasm of the Phantasm of Considering”
In response to Apple’s claims, a brand new paper titled “The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking” was launched on arXiv by unbiased researcher and technical author Alex Lawsen of the nonprofit Open Philanthropy, in collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.
The paper instantly challenges the unique examine’s conclusion that LLMs fail resulting from an inherent lack of ability to cause at scale. As a substitute, the rebuttal presents proof that the noticed efficiency collapse was largely a by-product of the take a look at setup—not a real restrict of reasoning functionality.
Lawsen and Claude show that most of the failures within the Apple examine stem from token limitations. For instance, in duties like Tower of Hanoi, the fashions should print exponentially many steps — over 32,000 strikes for simply 15 disks — main them to hit output ceilings.
The rebuttal factors out that Apple’s analysis script penalized these token-overflow outputs as incorrect, even when the fashions adopted an accurate answer technique internally.
The authors additionally spotlight a number of questionable job constructions within the Apple benchmarks. Among the River Crossing puzzles, they be aware, are mathematically unsolvable as posed, and but mannequin outputs for these circumstances have been nonetheless scored. This additional calls into query the conclusion that accuracy failures signify cognitive limits reasonably than structural flaws within the experiments.
To check their concept, Lawsen and Claude ran new experiments permitting fashions to offer compressed, programmatic solutions. When requested to output a Lua perform that would generate the Tower of Hanoi answer—reasonably than writing each step line-by-line—fashions out of the blue succeeded on much more advanced issues. This shift in format eradicated the collapse fully, suggesting that the fashions didn’t fail to cause. They merely failed to adapt to a man-made and overly strict rubric.
Why it issues for enterprise decision-makers
The back-and-forth underscores a rising consensus: analysis design is now as essential as mannequin design.
Requiring LRMs to enumerate each step could take a look at their printers greater than their planners, whereas compressed codecs, programmatic solutions or exterior scratchpads give a cleaner learn on precise reasoning skill.
The episode additionally highlights sensible limits builders face as they ship agentic techniques—context home windows, output budgets and job formulation could make or break user-visible efficiency.
For enterprise technical resolution makers constructing purposes atop reasoning LLMs, this debate is greater than tutorial. It raises essential questions on the place, when, and tips on how to belief these fashions in manufacturing workflows—particularly when duties contain lengthy planning chains or require exact step-by-step output.
If a mannequin seems to “fail” on a fancy immediate, the issue could not lie in its reasoning skill, however in how the duty is framed, how a lot output is required, or how a lot reminiscence the mannequin has entry to. That is significantly related for industries constructing instruments like copilots, autonomous brokers, or decision-support techniques, the place each interpretability and job complexity could be excessive.
Understanding the constraints of context home windows, token budgets, and the scoring rubrics utilized in analysis is crucial for dependable system design. Builders may have to contemplate hybrid options that externalize reminiscence, chunk reasoning steps, or use compressed outputs like features or code as a substitute of full verbal explanations.
Most significantly, the paper’s controversy is a reminder that benchmarking and real-world utility usually are not the identical. Enterprise groups must be cautious of over-relying on artificial benchmarks that don’t replicate sensible use circumstances—or that inadvertently constrain the mannequin’s skill to show what it is aware of.
Finally, the large takeaway for ML researchers is that earlier than proclaiming an AI milestone—or obituary—ensure that the take a look at itself isn’t placing the system in a field too small to assume inside.
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