Comment by hackinthebochs

>If that were true, we should have seen LLMs play good chess by now.

Not at all. LLMs learn by imbibing a mass of relationships as isolated fragments of information. There is a certain amount of sorting and indexing that happens during the training phase. There is also a certain amount of compute executed on these relationships during inference. LLMs can model processes that fit within the compute budget. Language translation works well because language is lookup-heavy while being light on compute.

Chess is a compute heavy game of finding the best move out of many possibilities with wide variation in the quality of each move. Humans cut through the compute requirements by reinforcement and learning intuition. LLMs don't get reinforcement on chess so they must compute during inference a unified model of chess. Developing a strong model of chess from raw fragments of information is simply not in their compute budget.