Apple has published a paper with a devastating title: “The Illusion of Thinking” It argues that AI models, no matter how brilliant they may seem, do not understand what they are doing. They do not solve problems. They do not reason. They merely generate text word by word, trying to sound coherent. Apple tested the most advanced reasoning models in the world on controlled puzzle environments. They tore open the internal "thinking" traces. What they found shatters the narrative that we are getting closer to AGI. Current models don't scale with complexity. They have a hard mathematical cliff. And they do not degrade gracefully. They collapse. But here is the most unsettling part. When a problem gets too complex, the AI doesn't use its remaining compute to try harder. It just gives up. Its reasoning effort actually declines. It stops thinking and starts guessing. Then Apple ran the experiment that closes the casket on the reasoning debate. They gave the AI the exact, step-by-step algorithm to solve the puzzle. The cheat codes. All the AI had to do was follow the instructions. It couldn't do it. Performance didn't improve at all. When the complexity gets high enough, these models fail because they cannot actually execute a logical sequence. They are not reasoning. They are just pattern matching. When you give them a simple problem, they overthink. When you give them a hard problem, they collapse. Paper: The Illusion of Thinking, Apple, 2025