https://twipped.social/@twipped/114662771295312758
article they are referencing: https://futurism.com/atari-beats-chatgpt-chess
LLM sucks at maths, sucks at chess, sucks at remembering stuff and being consistent … They suck at everything a computer is usually good at.
Yes, LLMs are designed to emulate how a human would respond to a prompt by digesting a huge amount of human-generated content. They can do that fairly well except when they can’t.
It’s a very specialized program intended to get a computer to do something that computers are generally very, very bad at - write sensible language about a wide variety of topics. Trying to then get that one specialized program to turn around and do things that computers are good at, and expect to do it well, is very silly.
Asking ChatGPT to play chess is like asking someone who’s not played Chess to play well, and then documenting how poorly it played. Like no shit the hammer did a bad job as a saw. You wanted it cut, you should have used the tool for the job.
ChatGPT isn’t Deep Blue. It’s not made for that. You’re asking a word processor to calculate pi.
That’s a very good move! To counter, you should follow these three principles:
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Prepare a response move that will prevent a future good move.
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Defend your own pieces and try to attack theirs.
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Don’t be too eager to sacrifice pieces in order to make short term gains.
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Be prepared to sacrifice an unimportant piece to make a good gain.
If you want to make a good move, try Rook H8 -> G7.
Queen to queen’s bishop three, Captain.
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I had a dedicated electronic chess game - a board with LEDs on it showing where the game wanted to move. You had to move physical pieces around and press membrane switches under the squares to tell it where you moved. I don’t remember if it was described as “AI” back then or not. I thought of it as a chess expert system on a chip. As a total novice player I could rarely beat it on its lowest skill level. Was never interested enough in chess to get the game for my 2600. But I still have both of those things in a box.
Chess engines don’t have real difficulties. Every level of the chess engine is designed to make more blunders as the elo gets smaller.
In other works it is programmed to make bad moves in regular intervals. What that means is even on beginner modes when the engine isn’t blundering it is playing perfect chess. This is why it isn’t good to play against chess bots. At best you will learn some pattern recognition but chess puzzles are better at that.
They could probably have done better by training a crow to play chess.
Using an LLM to play chess is like using autocorrect to write a novel.
And that’s the big problem with AI right now. People don’t understand what it is, they just want the label slapped on to as many things as possible.
AI is the new IoT, it will be integrated into everything, less than useless for 99.9% of consumers, and yet, still wildly successful.
Given how much it costs it will need to be ten times more successful than web search to even hop to break even. It’s the biggest dot com bubble yet.
It’s because the venture capitalists who are sinking BILLION$ into these things are calling it AI even though it’s not and literally never will be. And unfortunately, too many people are too stupid to understand that these aren’t AI but Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN’s for short. Which doesn’t sound as sexy and “take my money please”-ish as Artificial Intelligence or ✨AI✨ does.
These will never be HAL9000 or Jarvis or even Roku’s Basilisk. The stuff needed for that kind of “intelligence” doesn’t exist in these things. And the sooner people come to realize that this is all just digital snake oil the sooner we can collectively get on with our lives.
The brain dead morons who defend it and accuse me of just being a hater for understanding any part of it are the worst.
I literally no longer believe personhood is a thing because of how stupid and oblivious they’re capable of being.
Using an LLM to play chess is like using autocorrect to write a novel.
…What did I just read?
It’s AI generated and absolutely hilarious.
That is glorious. I’ve never wanted to read an entire book more.
No more like auto-fill on your phone.
‘they’ referring to people? Hell no. It’s just hyped onto them whether they like it or not.
Yet another corporate hype wasting massive resources.
Hundreds of billions of dollars spent
No profitable product
No consistently usable product other than beginner code tasks
Massive environmental harms
Tens of thousands of (useful!) careers terminated
Destroyed Internet search, arguably the one necessary service on the Internet
No chance it’s going to get better
Atari 2600 beating it at chess is a perfect metaphor. People who want to complain about it can bite its plastic woodgrain printed ass.
No consistently usable product other than beginner code tasks
I mean, it’s pretty good as a productivity tool for programmers as it eliminates a bunch of chore.
Oh my god you ‘people’. Did you not read what you replied to?
it introduces more problems than it solves.
Such as?
hallucinations, bugs, security flaws,
I swear you have never actually used copilot while programming and are just making shit up
i swear you have never actually programmed anything
Why? Because I can use a smarter autocomplete and I am open to change and not a dogmatic closeminded person?
Fine, we’ll stipulate to that. The conclusion is upheld.
It also demonstrates how much AI companies mislead the public on what their products can do. If a guy is selling lawnmowers that actually just generate grass clippings without mowing the lawn, you’re not an idiot for thinking it was going to mow grass.
But once someone explains it to you and you insist the grass was mowed, they show you the unmowed grass, and you still insist it’s great for mowing lawns.
And also you’re in the desert where you shouldn’t even have a fucking lawn, and you plant more lawns because they’re so easy to mow now
What do you call that? Because it’s a bit past ‘idiot’.
furthermore. companies mislead journalists, investors, philosphers, influencers etc. most of which dont have a technical background but a lot of reach. They then carry their misunderstanding into the general public.
All these public “academic” panel debates on conferences about AGI being the next nuclear weapon and singularity. They lead to Highbrow publications, opinion peaces, books and blog articles, which then lead to tweets, memes and pop cultural references
Huh… wait… what if we make a box… generate electricity bills… Call it a crypto miner?
Cram a bunch of space heaters into a box. Convince investors that all the electricity it burns up means it’s basically printing money. The building will inevitably burn down before anyone can investigate our claims.
I mean, you literally have whole videos on YouTube made by GothamChess who shows how LLMs play chess. They literally spawn pieces from air, play moves that are illegal etc.
Holy hell
New response just dropped
I’m quite sure that the guy understood pretty well what LLMs can do. He just wanted to deinflate all the bullshit promises by Techbros
Deinflate? Is that like uninflating? Or more like making something inflateless?
Tap for spoiler
It’s just deflate, and yes I feel like a dickhead for pointing it out.
“Deinflate” feels like actively sucking all the air out instead of letting it out passively. Unrelated, I know, but I think words are so neat
I bet the llm doesn’t even know what en passant is
Holy hell
It knows the definition though!
“Knows”
It literally doesn’t. It has a pointer to other pointers that often times are marked as correct.
LLMs can’t beat anyone or anything at chess because they can’t play chess at all. Try it. They don’t get more than a few moves in without degrading into total nonsense.
Okay, i think there is quite a misunderstanding here.
Some older versions of LLMs (chatgpt3.5-turbo-instruct) can play chess relatively well (around 1750 Elo) : here is a link to an article studying that.
Some points :
- it is of course way worse than almost any algorithm designed for chess
- one of the reason we cannot get these result back (at least not that good, here is a link to a blog post of someone making recent LLMs chatbots better at chess) could be that we do not have access to pure completion mode on models trained on selected data (where they could purposefully choose only good chess matches), and those are now hidden behind a chatbot layer instead.
- it seems to reveal that models have a somehow accurate representation of the chess board when predicting chess moves
- it seems to have a quite unique feat that is : if you feed them a prompt that say they play as a very good player, and then the beginning of a game with a blatant bad move (giving away a queen for example), they sometimes play the entire game with moves that purposefully give away pieces, as if they guess that the only reason they would lose a piece that easily is by purposefully losing them. It has close to zero utility, but it’s interesting anyway.
By my best feelings, this shit is a bigger bust than the .com bubble, and I predate that latter shit by roughly twenty years.
