MW Apple is behind in the AI race - and now its researchers say rival technologies 'collapse' and quit easily, too

By Steve Goldstein

Apple is trailing its major rivals in rolling out artificial intelligence-related technologies - but its researchers say the technology may be overhyped anyway.

Apple $(AAPL)$ in a research paper took aim at so-called reasoning models, from the big names in AI - OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google $(GOOGL)$.

With puzzles including the Tower of Hanoi, a classic mathematical puzzle involving stacking disks, Apple tested these models.

"Rather than standard benchmarks (e.g., math problems), we adopt controllable puzzle environments that let us vary complexity systematically - by adjusting puzzle elements while preserving the core logic - and inspect both solutions and internal reasoning," the paper states.

In all of the models, accuracy progressively declines as problem complexity increases, until reaching complete collapse, or zero accuracy.

And not only do the reasoning models fail to get the right answer, they have something of a quitters' mentality. "Near this collapse point, [large reasoning models] begin reducing their reasoning effort (measured by inference-time tokens) as problem complexity increases, despite operating well below generation length limits," the researchers say.

This laziness is most pronounced in the o3-mini variants of OpenAI, and less severe in Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

One other finding was even when Apple told the models the correct algorithm for solving the Tower of Hanoi, their performance didn't improve.

The paper started circulating on social media over the weekend, though there's no release date on it.

An Apple developers conference is due to start on Monday. ChatGPT is used in the Apple Intelligence service that was rolled out, to lackluster reviews, last fall.

-Steve Goldstein

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June 09, 2025 04:26 ET (08:26 GMT)

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