Sure, but installing a chess program is child/teen level general ability, and playing chess well is highly trained expert level ability. Which one are we sold AI as being?
I think we are being sold AI as expert only when given tools (although that is not emphasized). The (quasi?) miracle of AI right now is that you can get an agent to accomplish the task of a team of intelligent but not exceptional humans at speeds far exceeding what the human could do. Which makes it “cheap” to throw (effectively) dozens of teams at a problem for the equivalent of hundreds of man hours.
That may not be the AI of sci fi fantasy but it’s still a game changing reality.
A Transformer has a massive amount of state - it's entire KV cache, in addition to the user asking it to draw the state after every move, which is really unnecessary.
A human, at least a trained human (for fairer comparison to an LLM whose training data contained a ton of chess games) can absolutely do this - have you never seen demonstrations of expert players playing a dozen or more games while blindfolded?
A Transformer/LLM is not a human of course, and the way it will by default play chess is by prediction, not reasoning. An LLM actually does surprisingly well if you only give it the most recent 20 moves of a game where 40 moves have been played so far, since the moves NOT played tell it just as much as the ones that were played, letting it effectively infer a lot of what is on the board.
Sure, but installing a chess program is child/teen level general ability, and playing chess well is highly trained expert level ability. Which one are we sold AI as being?
I think we are being sold AI as expert only when given tools (although that is not emphasized). The (quasi?) miracle of AI right now is that you can get an agent to accomplish the task of a team of intelligent but not exceptional humans at speeds far exceeding what the human could do. Which makes it “cheap” to throw (effectively) dozens of teams at a problem for the equivalent of hundreds of man hours.
That may not be the AI of sci fi fantasy but it’s still a game changing reality.
I often don’t see agents reaching for available or potential tools/libraries unless explicitly told to.
Sometimes they’ll even manually search or write bespoke code to search json instead of using something like jq.
A Transformer has a massive amount of state - it's entire KV cache, in addition to the user asking it to draw the state after every move, which is really unnecessary.
A human, at least a trained human (for fairer comparison to an LLM whose training data contained a ton of chess games) can absolutely do this - have you never seen demonstrations of expert players playing a dozen or more games while blindfolded?
A Transformer/LLM is not a human of course, and the way it will by default play chess is by prediction, not reasoning. An LLM actually does surprisingly well if you only give it the most recent 20 moves of a game where 40 moves have been played so far, since the moves NOT played tell it just as much as the ones that were played, letting it effectively infer a lot of what is on the board.
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