The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity – Apple Machine Learning Research

Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

— Read on machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking