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If you don't play chess, the Atari is probably going to beat you as well.
LLMs are only good at things to the extent that they have been well-trained in the relevant areas. Not just learning to predict text string sequences, but reinforcement learning after that, where a human or some other agent says "this answer is better than that one" enough times in enough of the right contexts. It mimics the way humans learn, which is through repeated and diverse exposure.
If they set up a system to train it against some chess program, or (much simpler) simply gave it a tool call, it would do much better. Tool calling already exists and would be by far the easiest way.
It could also be instructed to write a chess solver program and then run it, at which point it would be on par with the Atari, but it wouldn't compete well with a serious chess solver.
this is because an LLM is not made for playing chess
Did the author thinks ChatGPT is in fact an AGI? It's a chatbot. Why would it be good at chess? It's like saying an Atari 2600 running a dedicated chess program can beat Google Maps at chess.
AI including ChatGPT is being marketed as super awesome at everything, which is why that and similar AI is being forced into absolutely everything and being sold as a replacement for people.
Something marketed as AGI should be treated as AGI when proving it isn't AGI.
Not to help the AI companies, but why don't they program them to look up math programs and outsource chess to other programs when they're asked for that stuff? It's obvious they're shit at it, why do they answer anyway? It's because they're programmed by know-it-all programmers, isn't it.
Because they’re fucking terrible at designing tools to solve problems, they are obviously less and less good at pretending this is an omnitool that can do everything with perfect coherency (and if it isn’t working right it’s because you’re not believing or paying hard enough)
why don't they program them
AI models aren't programmed traditionally. They're generated by machine learning. Essentially the model is given test prompts and then given a rating on its answer. The model's calculations will be adjusted so that its answer to the test prompt will be closer to the expected answer. You repeat this a few billion times with a few billion prompts and you will have generated a model that scores very high on all test prompts.
Then someone asks it how many R's are in strawberry and it gets the wrong answer. The only way to fix this is to add that as a test prompt and redo the machine learning process which takes an enormous amount of time and computational power each time it's done, only for people to once again quickly find some kind of prompt it doesn't answer well.
There are already AI models that play chess incredibly well. Using machine learning to solve a complexe problem isn't the issue. It's trying to get one model to be good at absolutely everything.
Most people do. It's just called AI in the media everywhere and marketing works. I think online folks forget that something as simple as getting a Lemmy account by yourself puts you into the top quintile of tech literacy.
well so much hype has been generated around chatgpt being close to AGI that now it makes sense to ask questions like "can chatgpt prove the Riemann hypothesis"
Tbf, the article should probably mention the fact that machine learning programs designed to play chess blow everything else out of the water.
Yeah its like judging how great a fish is at climbing a tree. But it does show that it's not real intelligence or reasoning
I forgot which airline it is but one of the onboard games in the back of a headrest TV was a game called “Beginners Chess” which was notoriously difficult to beat so it was tested against other chess engines and it ranked in like the top five most powerful chess engines ever
An LLM is a poor computational/predictive paradigm for playing chess.
ChatGPT has been, hands down, the worst AI coding assistant I've ever used.
It regularly suggests code that doesn't compile or isn't even for the language.
It generally suggests AC of code that is just a copy of the lines I just wrote.
Sometimes it likes to suggest setting the same property like 5 times.
It is absolute garbage and I do not recommend it to anyone.
I find it really hit and miss. Easy, standard operations are fine but if you have an issue with code you wrote and ask it to fix it, you can forget it
I swear every single article critical of current LLMs is like, "The square got BLASTED by the triangle shape when it completely FAILED to go through the triangle shaped hole."
It's newsworthy when the sellers of squares are saying that nobody will ever need a triangle again, and the shape-sector of the stock market is hysterically pumping money into companies that make or use squares.
It's also from a company claiming they're getting closer to create morphing shape that can match any hole.
Sometimes it seems like most of these AI articles are written by AIs with bad prompts.
Human journalists would hopefully do a little research. A quick search would reveal that researches have been publishing about this for over a year so there's no need to sensationalize it. Perhaps the human journalist could have spent a little time talking about why LLMs are bad at chess and how researchers are approaching the problem.
LLMs on the other hand, are very good at producing clickbait articles with low information content.
Gotham chess has a video of making chatgpt play chess against stockfish. Spoiler: chatgpt does not do well. It plays okay for a few moves but then the moment it gets in trouble it straight up cheats. Telling it to follow the rules of chess doesn't help.
This sort of gets to the heart of LLM-based "AI". That one example to me really shows that there's no actual reasoning happening inside. It's producing answers that statistically look like answers that might be given based on that input.
For some things it even works. But calling this intelligence is dubious at best.
I suppose it's an interesting experiment, but it's not that surprising that a word prediction machine can't play chess.
Because people want to feel superior because they ~~don't know how to use a ChatBot~~ can count the number of "r"s in the word "strawberry", lol
Yeah, just because I can't count the number of r's in the word strawberry doesn't mean I shouldn't be put in charge of the US nuclear arsenal!
LLM are not built for logic.
And yet everybody is selling to write code.
The last time I checked, coding was requiring logic.
A strange game. How about a nice game of Global Thermonuclear War?
No thank you. The only winning move is not to play
The Atari chess program can play chess better than the Boeing 747 too. And better than the North Pole. Amazing!
Neither of those things are marketed as being artificially intelligent.
Can ChatGPT actually play chess now? Last I checked, it couldn't remember more than 5 moves of history so it wouldn't be able to see the true board state and would make illegal moves, take it's own pieces, materialize pieces out of thin air, etc.
Ah, you used logic. That's the issue. They don't do that.
Hardly surprising. Llms aren't -thinking- they're just shitting out the next token for any given input of tokens.
That's exactly what thinking is, though.
An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It's like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness ("temperature") when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time.
But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It's a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g.
ollama run gemma3:4b
>>> /set parameter temperature 0
>>> what is a leaf
You will get the same answer every single time.
I know what an LLM is doing. You don't know what your brain is doing.
All these comments asking "why don't they just have chatgpt go and look up the correct answer".
That's not how it works, you buffoons, it trains off of datasets long before it releases. It doesn't think. It doesn't learn after release, it won't remember things you try to teach it.
Really lowering my faith in humanity when even the AI skeptics don't understand that it generates statistical representations of an answer based on answers given in the past.
It's not that hard to beat dumb 6 year old who's only purpose is mine your privacy to sell you ads or product place some shit for you in future.