@www.marktechpost.com
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Apple researchers are challenging the perceived reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), sparking debate within the AI community. A recent paper from Apple, titled "The Illusion of Thinking," suggests that these models, which generate intermediate thinking steps like Chain-of-Thought reasoning, struggle with fundamental reasoning tasks. The research indicates that current evaluation methods relying on math and code benchmarks are insufficient, as they often suffer from data contamination and fail to assess the structure or quality of the reasoning process.
To address these shortcomings, Apple researchers introduced controllable puzzle environments, including the Tower of Hanoi, River Crossing, Checker Jumping, and Blocks World, allowing for precise manipulation of problem complexity. These puzzles require diverse reasoning abilities, such as constraint satisfaction and sequential planning, and are free from data contamination. The Apple paper concluded that state-of-the-art LRMs ultimately fail to develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities, with accuracy collapsing to zero beyond certain complexities across different environments. However, the Apple research has faced criticism. Experts, like Professor Seok Joon Kwon, argue that Apple's lack of high-performance hardware, such as a large GPU-based cluster comparable to those operated by Google or Microsoft, could be a factor in their findings. Some argue that the models perform better on familiar puzzles, suggesting that their success may be linked to training exposure rather than genuine problem-solving skills. Others, such as Alex Lawsen and "C. Opus," argue that the Apple researchers' results don't support claims about fundamental reasoning limitations, but rather highlight engineering challenges related to token limits and evaluation methods. Recommended read:
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Carl Franzen@AI News | VentureBeat
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Mistral AI has launched its first reasoning model, Magistral, signaling a commitment to open-source AI development. The Magistral family features two models: Magistral Small, a 24-billion parameter model available with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, and Magistral Medium, a proprietary model accessible through an API. This dual release strategy aims to cater to both enterprise clients seeking advanced reasoning capabilities and the broader AI community interested in open-source innovation.
Mistral's decision to release Magistral Small under the permissive Apache 2.0 license marks a significant return to its open-source roots. The license allows for the free use, modification, and distribution of the model's source code, even for commercial purposes. This empowers startups and established companies to build and deploy their own applications on top of Mistral’s latest reasoning architecture, without the burdens of licensing fees or vendor lock-in. The release serves as a powerful counter-narrative, reaffirming Mistral’s dedication to arming the open community with cutting-edge tools. Magistral Medium demonstrates competitive performance in the reasoning arena, according to internal benchmarks released by Mistral. The model was tested against its predecessor, Mistral-Medium 3, and models from Deepseek. Furthermore, Mistral's Agents API's Handoffs feature facilitates smart, multi-agent workflows, allowing different agents to collaborate on complex tasks. This enables modular and efficient problem-solving, as demonstrated in systems where agents collaborate to answer inflation-related questions. Recommended read:
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Mark Tyson@tomshardware.com
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OpenAI has recently launched its newest reasoning model, o3-pro, making it available to ChatGPT Pro and Team subscribers, as well as through OpenAI’s API. Enterprise and Edu subscribers will gain access the following week. The company touts o3-pro as a significant upgrade, emphasizing its enhanced capabilities in mathematics, science, and coding, and its improved ability to utilize external tools.
OpenAI has also slashed the price of o3 by 80% and o3-pro by 87%, positioning the model as a more accessible option for developers seeking advanced reasoning capabilities. This price adjustment comes at a time when AI providers are competing more aggressively on both performance and affordability. Experts note that evaluations consistently prefer o3-pro over the standard o3 model across all categories, especially in science, programming, and business tasks. O3-pro utilizes the same underlying architecture as o3, but it’s tuned to be more reliable, especially on complex tasks, with better long-range reasoning. The model supports tools like web browsing, code execution, vision analysis, and memory. While the increased complexity can lead to slower response times, OpenAI suggests that the tradeoff is worthwhile for the most challenging questions "where reliability matters more than speed, and waiting a few minutes is worth the tradeoff.” Recommended read:
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Carl Franzen@AI News | VentureBeat
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Mistral AI has launched Magistral, its inaugural reasoning large language model (LLM), available in two distinct versions. Magistral Small, a 24 billion parameter model, is offered with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling developers to freely use, modify, and distribute the code for commercial or non-commercial purposes. This model can be run locally using tools like Ollama. The other version, Magistral Medium, is accessible exclusively via Mistral’s API and is tailored for enterprise clients, providing traceable reasoning capabilities crucial for compliance in highly regulated sectors such as legal, financial, healthcare, and government.
Mistral is positioning Magistral as a powerful tool for both professional and creative applications. The company highlights Magistral's ability to perform "transparent, multilingual reasoning," making it suitable for tasks involving complex calculations, programming logic, decision trees, and rule-based systems. Additionally, Mistral is promoting Magistral for creative writing, touting its capacity to generate coherent or, if desired, uniquely eccentric content. Users can experiment with Magistral Medium through the "Thinking" mode within Mistral's Le Chat platform, with options for "Pure Thinking" and a high-speed "10x speed" mode powered by Cerebras. Benchmark tests reveal that Magistral Medium is competitive in the reasoning arena. On the AIME-24 mathematics benchmark, the model achieved an impressive 73.6% accuracy, comparable to its predecessor, Mistral Medium 3, and outperforming Deepseek's models. Mistral's strategic release of Magistral Small under the Apache 2.0 license is seen as a reaffirmation of its commitment to open source principles. This move contrasts with the company's previous release of Medium 3 as a proprietary offering, which had raised concerns about a shift towards a more closed ecosystem. Recommended read:
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@medium.com
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DeepSeek's latest AI model, R1-0528, is making waves in the AI community due to its impressive performance in math and reasoning tasks. This new model, despite having a similar name to its predecessor, boasts a completely different architecture and performance profile, marking a significant leap forward. DeepSeek R1-0528 has demonstrated "unprecedented levels of demand" shooting to the top of the App Store past closed model rivals and overloading their API with unprecedented levels of demand to the point that they actually had to stop accepting payments.
The most notable improvement in DeepSeek R1-0528 is its mathematical reasoning capabilities. On the AIME 2025 test, the model's accuracy increased from 70% to 87.5%, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Pro and putting it in close competition with OpenAI's o3. This improvement is attributed to "enhanced thinking depth," with the model using significantly more tokens per question, engaging in more thorough chains of reasoning. This means the model can check its own work, recognize errors, and course-correct during problem-solving. DeepSeek's success is challenging established closed models and driving competition in the AI landscape. DeepSeek-R1-0528 continues to utilize a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, now scaled up to an enormous size. This sparse activation allows for powerful specialized expertise in different coding domains while maintaining efficiency. The context also continues to remain at 128k (with RoPE scaling or other improvements capable of extending it further.) The rise of DeepSeek is underscored by its performance benchmarks, which show it outperforming some of the industry’s leading models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Furthermore, the release of a distilled variant, R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, ensures broad accessibility of this powerful technology. Recommended read:
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@www.marktechpost.com
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DeepSeek has released a major update to its R1 reasoning model, dubbed DeepSeek-R1-0528, marking a significant step forward in open-source AI. The update boasts enhanced performance in complex reasoning, mathematics, and coding, positioning it as a strong competitor to leading commercial models like OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. The model's weights, training recipes, and comprehensive documentation are openly available under the MIT license, fostering transparency and community-driven innovation. This release allows researchers, developers, and businesses to access cutting-edge AI capabilities without the constraints of closed ecosystems or expensive subscriptions.
The DeepSeek-R1-0528 update brings several core improvements. The model's parameter count has increased from 671 billion to 685 billion, enabling it to process and store more intricate patterns. Enhanced chain-of-thought layers deepen the model's reasoning capabilities, making it more reliable in handling multi-step logic problems. Post-training optimizations have also been applied to reduce hallucinations and improve output stability. In practical terms, the update introduces JSON outputs, native function calling, and simplified system prompts, all designed to streamline real-world deployment and enhance the developer experience. Specifically, DeepSeek R1-0528 demonstrates a remarkable leap in mathematical reasoning. On the AIME 2025 test, its accuracy improved from 70% to an impressive 87.5%, rivaling OpenAI's o3. This improvement is attributed to "enhanced thinking depth," with the model now utilizing significantly more tokens per question, indicating more thorough and systematic logical analysis. The open-source nature of DeepSeek-R1-0528 empowers users to fine-tune and adapt the model to their specific needs, fostering further innovation and advancements within the AI community. Recommended read:
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