This isn't how intelligence works. The LLM may not be able to play chess directly through inference, but it can write a program to do it and execute that program. Same as how human intelligence works. We can't fly, but we can build planes.
Poorly in what sense? I think human chess leagues are way more popular and fun than just playing a computer by yourself. Human oriented communities are always a vastly better experience than their digital counterparts.
There's more to games than simply winning you know.
And how many years of direct play and study does it take for a human to get good at chess or any other game? Absolutely no human ever could be good at chess just by reading a few books, or even every book on chess. That's just not how the brain works. If LLMs could do that they would truly be superintelligence.
> Absolutely no human ever could be good at chess just by reading a few books, or even every book on chess.
Maybe not, but you'd be surprised how little it takes.
A six year old child can learn the rules of chess well enough to be able to play legal moves only in a single day. And they can improve their game at a pace which is almost frightening to behold. I have taught children, and I've witnessed significant improvement materialise in a single game. LLMs have probably thousands of chess books, games, videos, etc in their training data, yet they are unable to even follow the rules.
This is, at the very least, interesting. It illustrates many of the things brains can do, which current ML systems in general, and LLMs in particular, can't.
It is interesting, but people are drawing the wrong conclusion from it. For one, LLMs don't go through a "chess learning phase". They're not analyzing a board as they're learning the rules or studying games to create a coherent model of chess. They're just imbibing raw relationships as isolated fragments of information. The fact that they can't unify this into a coherent model of chess playing in one shot and execute a competent game says nothing interesting about the limits of their intelligence. If you give frontier models the rules of chess in their context window, could they perform only legal moves? I bet they could, excepting trickier scenarios like pins and failing to respond to a check. But those kinds of scenarios have to be reinforced in any human player as well. Even Super GMs fall for mate-in-1's occasionally which is functionally equivalent to those kinds of failures.
We're obviously using different meanings for "good" here. But aside from that, it took 100's to 1000's of reinforcement iterations for your brother to play competently. While certainly impressive, that is still an entirely different category from piecing together disparate facts learned during training (LLMs aren't analyzing a board as they're learning the rules or ingesting PGN files), to executing a competent performance in one shot.
No, learning is definitely not a sign of super intelligence. I know words don’t mean anything anymore, but that is simply general intelligence, despite the claims we have reached this milestone.
