m skeptical of reasoning models from AI companies. I’m skeptical of what these models claim to be doing versus what they are doing in a technical sense. I’m reminded of an old joke in the humanities: This is not a pipe (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte (source: Wikipedia)

The main point of the joke is that the image is not a pipe. It’s an image. Representation is not the thing itself. Representation misleads. Analogies are never perfect, never one-to-one.