Even since Scott’s post on Tuesday of this week, a new response has been launched titled “The Illusion of the Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking“
Abstract (emphasis added by me): A recent paper by Shojaee et al. (2025), The Illusion of Thinking, presented evidence of an “accuracy collapse” in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), suggesting fundamental limitations in their reasoning capabilities when faced with planning puzzles of increasing complexity. A compelling critique by Opus and Lawsen (2025), The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking, argued these findings are not evidence of reasoning failure but rather artifacts of flawed experimental design, such as token limits and the use of unsolvable problems. This paper provides a tertiary analysis, arguing that while Opus and Lawsen correctly identify critical methodological flaws that invalidate the most severe claims of the original paper, their own counter-evidence and conclusions may oversimplify the nature of model limitations. By shifting the evaluation from sequential execution to algorithmic generation, their work illuminates a different, albeit important, capability. We conclude that the original “collapse” was indeed an illusion created by experimental constraints, but that Shojaee et al.’s underlying observations hint at a more subtle, yet real, challenge for LRMs: a brittleness in sustained, high-fidelity, step-by-step execution. The true illusion is the belief that any single evaluation paradigm can definitively distinguish between reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and pattern execution.
As am writing a new manuscript about hallucination of web-enabled models, this is close to what I am working on. Conjuring up fake academic references might point to a lack of true reasoning ability.
Do Pro and Dantas believe that LLMs can reason? What they are saying, at least, is that evaluating AI reasoning is difficult. In their words, the whole back-and-forth “highlights a key challenge in evaluation: distinguishing true, generalizable reasoning from sophisticated pattern matching of familiar problems…”
The fact that the first sentence of the paper contains the bigram “true reasoning” is interesting in itself. No one dobuts that LLMs are reasoning anymore, at least within their own sandboxes. Hence there have been Champagne jokes going around of this sort:
If you’d like to read a response coming from o3 itself, Tyler pointed me to this:
Economist Writing Every Day 
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