Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? ->Quanta Magazine | More info at BigEarthData.ai | #AI
Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known as “large reasoning models,” or LRMs, were still new. Nowadays it may seem downright churlish, though, given that a “general-purpose reasoning model” from OpenAI solved a famous open mathematical research problem in one shot in May 2026. Still, I’m not sure how else to acknowledge my intellectual whiplash over the scientific interpretation of what these AI systems are actually doing. Reasoning comes in many technically defined forms, but the basic procedure is easily recognizable: arriving at a sound conclusion by linking together intermediate steps that logically follow from each other. We do this with thoughts; LRMs use so-called chains of thought, a term of art for the streams of synthetic text that the models emit before arriving at an answer to a complex query. One minute, the idea that AI could reason via these chains was being prominently and credibly critiqued (by a team of researchers from Apple) as an “Illusion of Thinking” subject to “complete accuracy collapse” under surprisingly simple conditions. The next minute,...www.quantamagazine.org