The Fault In Our Intelligence

Local Fluency, Global Failure, and the Limits of Machine Reasoning

Join us this January for a lecture that uses a deceptively simple object, the Möbius strip, to expose what today’s most powerful AI systems still fail to understand.

About the Lecture

Large language and vision models have become remarkably good at producing coherent text, convincing images, and fluent explanations. At a local level, they excel. And yet, when asked to reason across longer structures- spatially, logically, or causally and they often break down.

This lecture explores that failure.

Through a topological case study, the lecture opens into larger questions about AI reasoning:

• Why current models struggle to maintain truth across long contexts
• How surface-level fluency can mask deep structural misunderstanding
• The limits of statistical prediction in tasks involving planning, causality, and logic
• What “reasoning” really means,and how it differs from pattern imitation

By the end, you'll leave with a clearer, tangible understanding of why today’s AI systems feel intelligent, and where that intelligence decisively stops.

About the Lecturer

Aalok is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University, and an Alt Carbon Darjeeling Revival Fellow. His research focuses on logic in computer science and its applications to programming languages, automata theory, and trustworthy AI, with recent work extending into computational sustainability and CS pedagogy.

He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, where his doctoral work developed a framework for example-guided synthesis of relational queries. Prior to joining Ashoka, he worked as a research scientist at Aptos Labs, focusing on the verification of smart contracts, and has held research roles at Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Bell Labs, and ENS Paris-Saclay.

PS: Your ticket includes a complimentary beverage or snack at the venue—so you can tinker, think, and stay for conversation.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from St. Stephen’s, Delhi who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.