Comment by joefourier
10 hours ago
> current frontier models
> Gemini 2.5 Pro, O3, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and ChatGPT 4.1
The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. I would not trust that any conclusions they made are applicable.
I tested both myself and a weak bot against Astra xhigh, https://lichess.org/study/27lCQqDa. It's still pretty bad at chess, though it takes longer to devolve into illegal moves.
So give me a falsifiable point in time, a model you would claim succeeds at the task. One does not get to hotfix-patch updater out of the pressures of reality. Today is the day.
The gap in capabilities is mostly quantitative and not qualitative.
Is it? I am on the fence on this, but it does seem like there are some qualitative improvements between the models.
Not related to your post, but a fact I keep mulling over. The fact I don't trust the current crop of LLM's enough and I consider LLM's as a tech will hit a ceiling pretty hard, it doesn't mean parallel improvement curves won't spring up out of other research that will lead to much higher capabilities than currently.
They still need supervision though
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The actual current frontier plays somewhere around GM level.
https://chessbench-ai.github.io/#leaderboard
It's also worth noting that the very latest models (GPT-6 and Fable 5.1) actually play worse than their immediate predecessors, so it is likely that the labs are not benchmaxxing for this yet. If they did, I'm sure they could come up with something superior to humans. But there is probably very little demand for this compared to IT stuff.
I know HN readers and posters just read numbers and can't be bothered to read, but please read the methodology before making any claims.
> About their ELO ratings from their own website:
> A field-relative rating calculated within ChessBench. It compares performance among the tested models and is not a direct equivalent of a human chess rating.
I am around 1600 elo in over the board I can mop up Astra Fable etc even if I give them literal infinite time and all the subagents and internet access..
Please folks at least use your AIs to read stuff before making claims.
AI is not GM level, it's not even 1600, I am 1600 by using memorized openings people frequently fall for with very basic intuitions.
A GM is 2600 they can beat me in under 20 moves...
Why do I even scroll through this website. For a moment I truly felt fooled, but then I read like a human should.
Maybe I should stop doing that will be a happier life, don't think just believe in the AGI.
HN is no different than Reddit, or any social media for that matter, in that commenters pretend to read articles.
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HackerNews is Gell-Mann amnesia that refreshes on every comment on every thread.
What levels are they actually at in your experience?
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> even if I give them literal infinite time and all the subagents and internet access..
Don't use the word infinite in any CS claims. They can recreate or approximate monte Carlo tree search and it technically is still a correct solution in your framing of the problem so long they defeat you.
The AI can write a chess bot program that will beat you.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The system is built and delivered as it is because that's how the providers make the most money. If they cared to have it perform well in chess games, you'd see a different shape and behavior.
We shouldn't ask the multibillion dollar automated software generation system to play games with us any more than we should ask a Boeing's flight guidance system to do so.
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> I am around 1600 elo in over the board I can mop up Astra Fable etc even if I give them literal infinite time and all the subagents and internet access.
I don't believe this.
You refer to "subagents", so this is not just an LLM but an LLM with some kind of agentic harness. Any reasonable harness and prompt, given internet access and appropriately prompted to succeed on this task, is more than capable of firing up Lichess or chess.com and relaying moves back to you. The free levels will be enough to beat you.
A frontier model can also likely one shot a chess engine that plays at your level, again if given an environment in which it can do that.
I completely believe the LLM on its own can't play a full game of chess at your level. Though I'd bet that with enough reinforcement learning it is possible to train a pure transformer architecture to do that. We just don't do it because there are other approaches that play chess much better.
Even if you take that website at face value, the ELO scores shown are relative to the other AI models tested, and not comparable to the ELO scores of humans who play against other humans.
I wonder why they didn’t throw a real chess engine in there for a baseline. There are engines where you can set the elo in the settings, so it should possible to see these LLMs relative to a human 1500 rather than just relative to each other.
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These ratings seems very wrong, i have beaten GPT Astra max thinking in chess and my rating is close to 1500. The ratings here seem more accurate: https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/
GPT-6 almost never suggests an illegal move anymore while even Sol still did so time to time
"Elo is relative to the ChessBench field."
They are of course "wrong" if you don't read the faint fine print and sensibly interpret them as FIDE or similar ratings.
Probably tells us that without labs explicitly training/tuning the models or designing the harness (with fast oracle) the LLMs aren't going to get good at those areas.
If it's a GM then I'm Magnus Carlsen, https://lichess.org/study/27lCQqDa.
more like you lose intelligence in chess by maxing for coding... hence knocking back the claims of emergent intelligence
Dumbest thing I’ve seen today
Please do not post misinformation. They are not playing anywhere near GM level.
"Elo is relative to the ChessBench field."