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Comment by iainmerrick

10 hours ago

I think you have it backwards.

The common mistake is to think “maybe if we use a blend of raw data and hand-crafted heuristics, we’ll get the best of both worlds!” But the bitter lesson says no, beyond a certain point it’s better just to use the data.

Thinking that an LLM might be able to improve on purely “big data” machine learning seems to me to be the same incorrect idea. Its “intelligence” is no more useful than human intelligence. The LLM is based on a massive data corpus, sure, but the amount of data specifically about chess in there pales in comparison to just playing billions of games of chess.

Also, training it on chess books is literally training it on human knowledge, and not the actual game, which is exactly what the bitter lesson says not to do.

> I think you have it backwards.

> maybe if we use a blend of raw data and hand-crafted heuristics

I don't follow. They're suggesting giving raw chess data to the LLM, no heuristics involved.