ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

A fairer comparison would be Eliza vs ChatGPT.

I think people in the replies acting fake surprised are missing the point.

it is important news, because many people see LLMs as black boxes of superintelligence (almost as if that’s what they’re being marketed as!)

you and i know that’s bullshit, but the students asking chatgpt to solve their math homework instead of using wolfram alpha doesn’t.

so yes, it is important to demonstrate that this "artificial intelligence" is so much not an intelligence that it’s getting beaten by 1979 software on 1977 hardware

A chess-specific algorithm beat a language model at chess. Shocking!

Try training a chess model. Actually I think it's already been done, machines have been consistently better at chess than humans for a while now.

I'm shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren't superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they're not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they'll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they'll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn't phrased exactly the right way they'll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They'll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it's quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don't really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren't funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they're almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you've got writer's block or something.

This is useful for dispelling the hype around ChatGPT and for demonstrating the limits of general purpose LLMs.

But that's about it. This is not a "win" for old school game engines vs new ones. Stockfish uses deep reinforcement learning and is one of the strongest chess engines in the world.

EDIT: what would be actually interesting would be to see if GPT could be fine-tuned to play chess. Which is something many people have been doing: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=finetune+gpt+chess

In other news, my toaster absolutely wrecked my T.V. at making toast.

How did alpha go do?