Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence? | Quanta Magazine
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Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence?
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The Joy of Why
Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence?
By
Steven Strogatz
and
Janna Levin
August 20, 2026
Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition.
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Chanelle Nibbelink for Quanta Magazine
Introduction
Authors
Steven Strogatz
Podcast Host
Janna Levin
Contributing Columnist
August 20, 2026
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artificial intelligence
computer science
deep learning
large language models
machine learning
natural language processing
neural networks
The Joy of Why
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When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely we need to supervise it, and ultimately what its real-world impact will turn out to be.
Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute argues that we lack adequate methods for measuring machine cognition, and that AI is a form of “alien intelligence” that operates through non-human cognitive mechanisms. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Mitchell tells Steven Strogatz how methods that psychologists use to study cognition in other kinds of “alien intelligence” — babies and animals — can be adapted to probe AI, and she lays out six principles for better assessing machine cognition. Their conversation ranges from the challenge of interpreting what’s happening inside these systems, to recent AI-assisted breakthroughs in mathematics, to why a math-performing horse from the early 1900s offers a cautionary tale for how we assess intelligence.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.
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[Music plays]
STEVE STROGATZ: I’m Steve Strogatz.
JANNA LEVIN: And I’m Janna Levin.
STROGATZ: And this is The Joy of Why.
LEVIN: A podcast from Quanta Magazine where we explore some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.
STROGATZ: Well, hello, hello. This is unsurprisingly yet another show about AI.
LEVIN: I’m telling you, it’s a topic people can’t seem to get enough about, and I’m becoming reluctant to pontificate anymore. It’s changing too quickly.
STROGATZ: It’s true. It is moving very fast. Anything we say could be obsolete by next week.
LEVIN: Oh yeah.
STROGATZ: As we speak, it’s July 23rd, 2026.
LEVIN: And it feels different to me than it did in July 23rd, 2025, that’s for sure.
STROGATZ: Mmm. That’s actually relevant, this talking about timelines, because our guest today, Melanie Mitchell, who is a cognitive scientist and computer scientist at Santa Fe Institute, is someone that we had on the show previously. She and I spoke about five years ago, and that is before ChatGPT.
LEVIN: Right. And was she interested in AI then?
STROGATZ: Oh, yes.
LEVIN: Okay, so it wasn’t just cognitive science.
STROGATZ: Absolutely. I, I mean, yes, I should say Melanie has been thinking about AI for a long time, and she’ll tell us about that. But the thing that’s gonna be so interesting, I feel, for us to discuss today is, um, Melanie’s point of view, which is to think about the problem of AI from the standpoint of fields like developmental psychology. Like, how does a baby or a young child get to be as intelligent as they soon become?
LEVIN: Oh, I think that’s so interesting ’cause we’re so excited about the artificial mind when we have very little comprehension of the human mind.
STROGATZ: Exactly.
LEVIN: Right, so we’re trying to skip a step.
STROGATZ: Well, that’s right. And not just human mind, but also animal minds, right? So there’s the field of comparative psychology where we look at intelligence in birds or dogs or dolphins, whatever. Um, we have a lot to learn about thinking about intelligences other than our own adult human intelligence.
LEVIN: Yeah, and this idea that we’re going to somehow simply understand a mechanism to generate an artificial intelligence when we, again, don’t understand the mechanism that brings a baby to have its level of intelligence when it’s born or when it’s developing. I mean, I think that’s really interesting to combine...