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

A 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, large reasoning models) are able to reason reliably.

Apple showed that leading models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Deepseek may “look smart but when complexity rises, they collapse”.

We don’t want an AGI that fails to “carry the one” in basic arithmetic just because sometimes humans do.

We can never fully trust generative AI ; its outputs are just too hit-or-miss.

The Apple paper shows that these LLMs that have generated so much hype are no substitute for good, well-specified conventional algorithms.