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AI Socratic
July 2025
Research

A comment on "The Illusion of Thinking"

Pfizer researchers argue that what looks like a collapse in AI reasoning may actually be an Agentic gap — models failing not in thought, but in action.

When given tools, the same models crushed tasks they had just failed. The problem isn’t thinking, it’s interface.

A must-read reframing of “The Illusion of Thinking.” Agentic intelligence is the real frontier.

Federico UlfoFederico Ulfo
Research

Potemkins Understanding in LLM

The paper documents a pattern they called Potemkins, a kind of reasoning inconsistency (see figure below). They show that LLMs - even models like o3 — make these errors frequently.

Gary Marcus: "You can’t possibly create AGI based on machines that cannot keep consistent with their own assertions. You just can’t."

Since we're talking about Gary Marcus, let's diverge a second, here's some amazing blog post from Gary, on Neurosymbolic AI:

Gary Marcus’s essay traces the decades-long debate between two main approaches in artificial intelligence:

  • Symbolic AI (symbol-manipulation approach): Rooted in logic and mathematics, this tradition uses explicit rules, symbols, and databases to represent knowledge and perform reasoning.

  • Neural networks (connectionist approach): Inspired by the brain, these systems learn from large amounts of data and are the foundation of today’s large language models (LLMs) like GPT.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-o3-and-grok-4-accidentally-vindicated

And more rants from him on the crisis in the industry with talents getting swopped left and right.

Federico UlfoFederico Ulfo

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