“If there is a severe deficit of language,

there will be severe deficit of thought”

Noam Chomsky.

The Reasoning Promise

Beginning with OpenAI's o1-preview model in September 2024, the pursuit for artificial reasoning took a major leap forward. This was the first AI system explicitly designed to 'think' before responding, using chain-of-thought reasoning—a technique first introduced by Wei et al. in 2022. DeepSeek-R1 in January 2025, showed that reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) could be improved solely through reinforcement learning, followed by Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which presented the first hybrid reasoning architecture in February 2025. These events paved the way, laid the foundations for what would be the minimum expected in future language models, and established what are now known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), models designed to show their step-by-step thinking process.

Continuing in 2025, multiple models were presented adding this new “thinking” feature; AI giants like Google and OpenAI presented Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 models respectively, while Alibaba QwQ-32B followed DeepSeek's open source models approach. But this rapid progress hit a major roadblock when Apple—who had been harshly criticized for their weak efforts in this AI race—questioned the very foundation of these advances stating that “despite their sophisticated self-reflection mechanisms learned through reinforcement learning, these models fail to develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities for planning tasks, with performance collapsing to zero beyond a certain complexity” as the foundational argument of the paper, published in June 2025, “The Illusion of Thinking”. This began a discussion among the community and unveiled various viewpoints over Apple’s statement, even making Anthropic publish a critical response only a few days after in their paper “The illusion of the illusion of thinking.”

Having mentioned this brief overview over one of the biggest dilemmas in the AGI promise: Are machines actually capable of thinking on their own? I thought it could be a good chance for mentioning my own thoughts on this matter, as well as reviewing the arguments presented by Apple and the refuting claims it caused.

The Illusion.

With the intent of having a deep understanding of the models’ reasoning capabilities, Apple leveraged...

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