3 days ago
Apple is behind in the AI race — and now its researchers say rival technologies ‘collapse' and quit easily, too
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.
'It might be another Apple or Microsoft': My wife invested $100K in one stock and it exploded 1,500%. Do we sell?
Fund manager who sold Tesla, just in time, says investors are overlooking these tech bargains
'I prepaid our mom's rent for a year': My sister is a millionaire and never helps our mother. How do I cut her out of her will?
'The situation is extreme': I'm 65 and leaving my estate to only one grandchild. Can the others contest my will?
I have $1,000 in credit-card debt. Will I be able to hide my inheritance from the bank?
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.
I bought my mother-in-law a condo — and she took out a $30,000 car loan. Now she refuses to get a roommate.
I help my elderly mother every day and drive her to appointments. Can I recoup my costs from her estate?
'He failed in his fiduciary duty': My brother liquidated our mother's 401(k) for her nursing home. He claimed the rest.
Third time lucky? Citi changes its S&P target once more after index hits 6,000.
Risky stocks and safe-haven gold are both aiming for records. Who will blink first?
