The Jagged Peaks And Valleys Of AI Intelligence
Techstrong.ai, Thursday, April 16th, 2026
Anyone who has spent real time using AI has had the same experience. One moment, it performs what feels like a magic trick. It writes working code in seconds. It summarizes long reports instantly. It solves problems that used to require serious technical expertise.
Then five minutes later, it produces an answer so obviously wrong you wonder if the machine just forgot how to think.
This strange duality has become one of the defining characteristics of modern AI.
A recent New York Times opinion piece captured this perfectly, describing how AI systems built by Google and OpenAI managed to correctly answer five of six problems from the International Math Olympiad, one of the most difficult math competitions in the world for elite high school students. Yet those same systems struggled with a simple reasoning question about whether someone should walk or drive a car only 50 meters to a repair shop.