Comment by dmurray

> 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.