The Illusion of Thinking: What the Apple AI Paper Says About LLM Reasoning

Deep Papers

This week we discuss The Illusion of Thinking, a new paper from researchers at Apple that challenges today’s evaluation methods and introduces a new benchmark: synthetic puzzles with controllable complexity and clean logic.

Their findings? Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show surprising failure modes, including a complete collapse on high-complexity tasks and a decline in reasoning effort as problems get harder.
Dylan and Parth dive into the paper's findings as well as the debate around it, including a response paper aptly titled "The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking."
Read the paper: The Illusion of Thinking
Read the response: The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking
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