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When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus

The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversoldA research paper by Apple has taken the tech world by storm, all but eviscerating the popular notion that large language models (LLMs, and their newest variant, LRMs, large reasoning models) are able to reason reliably. Some are shocked by it, some are not. The well-known venture capitalist Josh Wolfe went so far as to post on X that “Apple [had] just GaryMarcus’d LLM reasoning ability” – coining a new verb (and a compliment to me), referring to “the act of critically exposing or debunking the overhyped capabilities of artificial intelligence … by highlighting their limitations in reasoning, understanding, or general intelligence”.Apple did this by showing that leading models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Deepseek may “look smart – but when complexity rises, they collapse”. In short, these models are very good at a kind of pattern recognition, but often fail when they encounter novelty that forces them beyond the limits of their training, despite being, as the paper notes, “explicitly designed for reasoning tasks”.This essay was adapted from Gary Marcus’s newsletter, Marcus on AIGary Marcus is a professor emeritus at New York University, the founder of two AI companies, and the author of six books, including Taming Silicon Valley Continue reading...

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