The Rational Illusion: How LLMs Outplayed Humans at Cooperation
Opening — Why this matters now As AI systems begin to act on behalf of humans—negotiating, advising, even judging—the question is no longer can they make rational decisions, but whose rationality they follow. A new study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center offers a fascinating glimpse into this frontier: large language models (LLMs) can now replicate and predict human cooperation across classical game theory experiments. In other words, machines are beginning to play social games the way we do—irrational quirks and all. ...