"Bizarro is a botched experiment by the genius villain Lex Luthor to replicate Superman. He looks like the Man of Steel, has his powers, and even tries to do good - but everything he does comes out wrong. He saves people by endangering them, speaks in twisted opposites, and mistakes harm for help. He isn't evil - just reversed. That inversion - an imitation of greatness that misunderstands its essence - is a fitting metaphor for modern AI."
"At first the models performed well, but as the puzzles grew more complex, their reasoning began to fail. Instead of increasing their effort, the models produced shorter and less coherent thought chains. They often stopped trying even when more computation time was available. The researchers observed that these systems were not reasoning at all. They were matching patterns that looked like reasoning."
Childhood admiration for Superman inspired a comparison between Superman's failed replica, Bizarro, and modern AI: an imitation that misunderstands underlying essence. Bizarro possesses Superman's powers but performs reversed actions, harming when attempting help. Apple's 2025 paper The Illusion of Thinking evaluated "Large Reasoning Models" on puzzles like Tower of Hanoi and Blocks World. Models initially succeeded but failed as task complexity rose, producing shorter, less coherent reasoning chains and ceasing effort despite available computation. Researchers concluded the systems matched patterns resembling reasoning rather than engaging in true thought. The models' outputs sounded intelligent yet lacked real understanding, amounting to prediction rather than thinking.
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