Taking more seriously the claim that recent ML models do not "reason", it still is quite odd the particular ways that superhuman game-playing models fail, suggesting that what they're doing is something quite different from human reasoning about play
Jul 13, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? | Quanta Magazine
The idea that artificial intelligence can “reason” is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled.
Training AI models doesn't emit that much
If we just make reasonable comparisons instead of crazy ones
Look-ahead Reasoning with a Learned Model in Imperfect Information Games
Test-time reasoning significantly enhances pre-trained AI agents' performance. However, it requires an explicit environment model, often unavailable or overly complex in real-world scenarios....
There’s a Reason Women Aren’t Swooning Over AI Like Men Are
Or rather, a great many reasons
Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity
Specification gaming is a behaviour that satisfies the literal specification of an objective without achieving the intended outcome. We have all had experiences with specification gaming, even if not by this name. Readers may have heard the myth of King Midas and the golden touch, in which the king asks that anything he touches be turned to gold - but soon finds that even food and drink turn to metal in his hands. In the real world, when rewarded for doing well on a homework assignment, a student might copy another student to get the right answers, rather than learning the material - and thus exploit a loophole in the task specification.
Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?
Go Lives
The greatest Go player of all time just did something amazing. What can this tell us about life in the era of superhuman AI?
The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think
The rhetoric over “superhuman” AI implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.
Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI
SAN MATEO, CA—After spending the past three decades of his life being totally unable and unwilling to engage in any meaningful way with the world around him, James Parker, a local guy who sucks at being a person, told reporters Thursday that he saw huge potential in AI. “While it’s still in its early phase, artificial intelligence will one day accomplish things that humans could have never even dreamed of doing,” said Parker, who, by all accounts, has never stretched himself to do something he found difficult; has never created anything truly original; and, deep down, has absolutely zero understanding of what makes things good, enjoyable, or rewarding. “Just yesterday, I asked an AI program to write an entire sci-fi novel for me, and [as someone who will die an empty shell of a man who wasted his life doing nothing for the world and, perhaps, should never have been born] I was super impressed. Soon, humans won’t need to do anything at all! Awesome.” At press time, Parker added that as someone whose contributions to society would almost certainly be measured cumulatively as a net loss, he also saw great potential in the future of the metaverse.
AI is not superhuman
What metaphor should drive the field of AI research?
Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil”
But training on "synthetic stories" that model good AI behavior can help.
17. A Value for n-Person Games
17. A Value for n-Person Games was published in Contributions to the Theory of Games, Volume II on page 307.
Ico, disruptive game design, and experiences that live forever.
100 updates later. Why we enjoy games, why we stop, and how live game design might bring us back.
The AI Attribution Error
If an AI produces something useful it's because of your own skill in model choice, prompting, and steering. If not, it's because the model is a useless lying machine that can't follow directions.
Experts Argue Whether Computers Could Reason, and if They Should (Published 1977)
Computer world is in midst of fundamental dispute over question of computer intelligence since MIT Prof Joseph Weizenbaum wrote book arguing that machines can never be made to reason like people and should not be; Weizenbaum por (M)
