AI: Too Smart or Too Dumb to Think Like Us?
- Dennis Hulsebos
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Why “Illusion of thinking” makes a great clickbait title, but a poor reading of the evidence.
The Headline Hype: How a Stress-Test Became a Doom-Post
Most headlines follow the same tone: “AI reasoning fatally flawed,” “Apple exposes the illusion of intelligence.” These headlines reference Apple’s recent paper, The Illusion of Thinking, but rarely do they engage with the paper’s actual content.
So what did the paper actually test? It benchmarked models on a narrow class of symbolic puzzles: Tower of Hanoi, Blocks World, River Crossing, and Checkers. These puzzles were chosen because they offer objective ways to check correctness. Even so, the authors make clear that this represents only a narrow slice of reasoning. It is not intended as a comprehensive evaluation of intelligence.
