Apple’s ‘Illusion of Thinking’ Paper Sparks Industry Reflection — Strategic Intelligence and Value Creation Firm Urges Elevation from IQ and EQ to HQ (Humane Intelligence)
New York, NY — June 10, 2025 — A new research paper released by Apple, titled “The Illusion of Thinking,” reveals a critical limitation in today’s reasoning-focused AI models—often built on large language model architectures but evaluated for their ability to reason rather than simply generate fluent responses. These models can produce confident, plausible answers while lacking genuine understanding or cognitive depth—a failure mode that the paper warns could lead to ‘performance collapse’ when systems are deployed in real-world, dynamic reasoning tasks that differ from their training distributions. As these AI systems become deeply embedded across sectors, this flaw poses serious risks.
In response, Strategic Intelligence and Value Creation Firm Future | Future is urging leaders to develop HQ (Humane Intelligence): a leadership imperative, operating framework, and foundational approach for engaging with interactive intelligence. HQ ensures that both human and artificial intelligence evolve in alignment with organizational values and the systems in which they operate.
“Apple’s findings confirm what many practitioners have observed firsthand: AI that sounds smart can still act dumb,” said Heidi Hysell, founder of Future | Future and architect of the HQ framework. “Humane Intelligence is about elevating our own intelligence and understanding as models advance—it’s not just about interacting with AI, but building systems that enable recognition of limits, alignment with values, and evolve in partnership to the best outcomes.”
HQ helps leaders understand intelligence within ourselves, between people, and across increasingly autonomous systems—and to navigate the evolving interplay between human and machine cognition with clarity, adaptability, and ethical foresight.
Apple’s paper introduces a new benchmark, SCORE, designed to distinguish between surface-level fluency and true reasoning ability. Their research reveals how reasoning models often perform well on benchmarks that reward surface-level pattern completion rather than actual reasoning—creating an illusion of intelligence. Apple concludes that “strong performance on certain benchmarks can mask weak reasoning,” underscoring the need for more robust evaluation and design paradigms for intelligent systems.
This work shows how superficial correctness can mask fundamental reasoning gaps. This is not a minor technical bug—it’s a systemic failure with real-world implications. As Ethan Mollick recently noted, the paper’s conclusions—though valid—have been overstated in popular discourse: “People are looking for a reason to not have to deal with what AI can do today, and what it might be able to do in the future… even if it did not continue to develop (no sign of that yet), current systems are good enough for massive changes.”
Mollick’s observation highlights the deeper leadership and cultural challenge at play: denial, hesitation, and the false comfort of minimization. HQ offers a counter-response—a framework for engaging change responsibly and proactively.
Key HQ Pillars for CxOs:
- Value Alignment: Ensure AI-driven actions reflect core ethics and purpose, protecting stakeholder trust.
- Adaptive Resilience: Build capacity to learn, adapt, and lead through uncertainty.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Design human-AI systems that enhance creativity, intelligence, and innovation.
Organizations today are shifting from managing human resources to managing interactive intelligence—the blend of human and autonomous agents. As AI becomes an active collaborator, HQ helps organizations:
- Maintain ethical alignment and human dignity in decision-making.
- Proactively manage emergent behaviors and unintended consequences.
- Balance AI’s speed and scale with wisdom and contextual judgment.
“‘Illusions of thinking’ aren’t just technical challenges. They are leadership challenges,” Hysell said. “Humane Intelligence is how we evolve—not just our tools, but ourselves and our ways of engaging.”
For media inquiries or to learn more about HQ (Humane Intelligence) and how to implement it across your organization, please contact:
Press Contact
hello@futurefuture.co
About Future | Future: Future | Future is a Strategic Intelligence and Value Creation Firm helping leaders and organizations evolve for the AI era. Through strategy and systems design, the firm advances intelligence and adaptive futures grounded in human, ecosystem, and AI relevance and resilience.
Learn more at https://futurefuture.co
Read the full Apple research paper, “The Illusion of Thinking,” here: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf
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