Tools of Thought: Why Reasoning Isn’t an Illusion After All
In early 2025, Apple’s now-infamous “thinking-illusion” benchmark delivered a sobering verdict: large reasoning models (LRMs)—those step-by-step thinkers like DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen 3 Thinking—failed to show meaningful advantages over simpler LLMs. Their verbose, reflective outputs didn’t help on easy problems, nor did they scale on hard ones. In some cases, they even underperformed. But what if we were judging thinking models under unfair conditions? A new study titled “Thinking Isn’t an Illusion” argues that the problem isn’t with reasoning itself—it’s with reasoning in a vacuum. When these models are augmented with tools like Python interpreters and structured scratchpads, their performance transforms dramatically. In fact, they begin to consistently outperform their non-reasoning counterparts across a diverse set of logic puzzles. ...