> Apple’s new paper, The Illusion of Thinking, quietly released ahead of WWDC 2025, challenges many of the assumptions we’ve come to rely on in the LLM space.

> Apple’s new paper, The Illusion of Thinking, quietly released ahead of WWDC 2025, challenges many of the assumptions we’ve come to rely on in the LLM space. So... wait, were people _really_ assuming that these things were reasoning? Why? Like, because the marketing said so? I had the idea that that was generally viewed as puffery; obviously they're not reasoning. It's an interesting paper, but its outcome is completely unsurprising. What would have been surprising is if it had shown something different. > Perhaps the most unsettling finding is what failure looks like. Even when models are completely wrong, they sound persuasive. Again... This has been a fairly well-known problem with LLMs since GPT-3 or so. I'm not sure why anyone would find it unsettling at this point; they're confident-sounding bullshit engines.