What the Recent Apple Study Taught Us About AI, Reasoning, and Assessment
In June 2025, Apple published a landmark study that has sent shockwaves through the AI and assessment communities. The research, titled The Illusion of Thinking, rigorously tested the reasoning abilities of the most advanced AI models—so-called large reasoning models (LRMs) from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others—using a series of classic logic puzzles designed to scale in complexity. The findings have profound implications for how we understand AI’s capabilities, especially in the context of educational assessment.