this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Did the author thinks ChatGPT is in fact an AGI? It's a chatbot. Why would it be good at chess? It's like saying an Atari 2600 running a dedicated chess program can beat Google Maps at chess.
AI including ChatGPT is being marketed as super awesome at everything, which is why that and similar AI is being forced into absolutely everything and being sold as a replacement for people.
Something marketed as AGI should be treated as AGI when proving it isn't AGI.
Not to help the AI companies, but why don't they program them to look up math programs and outsource chess to other programs when they're asked for that stuff? It's obvious they're shit at it, why do they answer anyway? It's because they're programmed by know-it-all programmers, isn't it.
AI models aren't programmed traditionally. They're generated by machine learning. Essentially the model is given test prompts and then given a rating on its answer. The model's calculations will be adjusted so that its answer to the test prompt will be closer to the expected answer. You repeat this a few billion times with a few billion prompts and you will have generated a model that scores very high on all test prompts.
Then someone asks it how many R's are in strawberry and it gets the wrong answer. The only way to fix this is to add that as a test prompt and redo the machine learning process which takes an enormous amount of time and computational power each time it's done, only for people to once again quickly find some kind of prompt it doesn't answer well.
There are already AI models that play chess incredibly well. Using machine learning to solve a complexe problem isn't the issue. It's trying to get one model to be good at absolutely everything.
Because they’re fucking terrible at designing tools to solve problems, they are obviously less and less good at pretending this is an omnitool that can do everything with perfect coherency (and if it isn’t working right it’s because you’re not believing or paying hard enough)
Or they keep telling you that you just have to wait it out. It’s going to get better and better!
...or a simple counter to count the r in strawberry. Because that's more difficult than one might think and they are starting to do this now.
This is where MCP comes in. It's a protocol for LLMs to call standard tools. Basically the LLM would figure out the tool to use from the context, then figure out the order of parameters from those the MCP server says is available, send the JSON, and parse the response.
Because the AI doesn't know what it's being asked, it's just a algorithm guessing what the next word in a reply is. It has no understanding of what the words mean.
"Why doesn't the man in the Chinese room just use a calculator for math questions?"
Because the LLMs are now being used to vibe code themselves.
They are starting to do this. Most new models support function calling and can generate code to come up with math answers etc
If you pay for chatgpt you can connect it with wolfrenalpha and it's relays the maths to it
I don't pay for ChatGPT and just used the Wolfram GPT. They made the custom GPTs non-paid at some point.
I think they're trying to do that. But AI can still fail at that lol
They will, when it makes sense for what the AI is designed to do. For example, ChatGPT can outsource image generation to an AI dedicated to that. It also used to calculate math using python for me, but that doesn't seem to happen anymore, probably due to security issues with letting the AI run arbitrary python code.
ChatGPT however was not designed to play chess, so I don't see why OpenAI should invest resources into connecting it to a chess API.
I think especially since adding custom GPTs, adding this kind of stuff has become kind of unnecessary for base ChatGPT. If you want a chess engine, get a GPT which implements a Stockfish API (there seem to be several GPTs that do). For math, get the Wolfram GPT which uses Wolfram Alpha's API, or a different powerful math GPT.
Google Maps doesn't pretend to be good at chess. ChatGPT does.
A toddler can pretend to be good at chess but anybody with reasonable expectations knows that they are not.
Plot twist: the toddler has a multi-year marketing push worth tens if not hundreds of millions, which convinced a lot of people who don't know the first thing about chess that it really is very impressive, and all those chess-types are just jealous.
Have you tried feeding the toddler gallons of baby-food? Maybe then it can play chess
They’ve been feeding the toddler everybody else’s baby food and claiming they have the right to.
"If we have to ask every time before stealing a little baby food, our morbidly obese toddler cannot survive"
Most people do. It's just called AI in the media everywhere and marketing works. I think online folks forget that something as simple as getting a Lemmy account by yourself puts you into the top quintile of tech literacy.
well so much hype has been generated around chatgpt being close to AGI that now it makes sense to ask questions like "can chatgpt prove the Riemann hypothesis"
Even the models that pretend to be AGI are not. It's been proven.
I agree with your general statement, but in theory since all ChatGPT does is regurgitate information back and a lot of chess is memorization of historical games and types, it might actually perform well. No, it can't think, but it can remember everything so at some point that might tip the results in it's favor.
Regurgitating an impression of, not regurgitating verbatim, that's the problem here.
Chess is 100% deterministic, so it falls flat.
I'm guessing it's not even hard to get it to "confidently" violate the rules.
OpenAI has been talking about AGI for years, implying that they are getting closer to it with their products.
https://openai.com/index/planning-for-agi-and-beyond/
https://openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/
Not to even mention all the hype created by the techbros around it.
You're not wrong, but keep in mind ChatGPT advocates, including the company itself are referring to it as AI, including in marketing. They're saying it's a complete, self-learning, constantly-evolving Artificial Intelligence that has been improving itself since release... And it loses to a 4KB video game program from 1979 that can only "think" 2 moves ahead.
That's totally fair, the company is obviously lying, excuse me "marketing", to promote their product, that's absolutely true.
I think that’s generally the point is most people thing chat GPT is this sentient thing that knows everything and… no.
Do they though? No one I talked to, not my coworkers that use it for work, not my friends, not my 72 year old mother think they are sentient.
Okay I maybe exaggerated a bit, but a lot of people think it actually knows things, or is actually smart. Which… it’s not… at all. It’s just pattern recognition. Which was I assume the point of showing it can’t even beat the goddamn Atari because it cannot think or reason, it’s all just copy pasta and pattern recognition.
Articles like this are good because it exposes the flaws with the ai and that it can't be trusted with complex multi step tasks.
Helps people see that think AI is close to a human that its not and its missing critical functionality
The problem is though that this perpetuates the idea that ChatGPT is actually an AI.
People already think chatGPT is a general AI. We need more articles like this showing is ineffectiveness at being intelligent. Besides it helps find a limitations of this technology so that we can hopefully use it to argue against every single place
In all fairness. Machine learning in chess engines is actually pretty strong.
https://www.chess.com/terms/alphazero-chess-engine
Sure, but machine learning like that is very different to how LLMs are trained and their output.
Oh absolutely you can apply machine learning to game strategy. But you can't expect a generalized chatbot to do well at strategic decision making for a specific game.
I like referring to LLMs as VI (Virtual Intelligence from Mass Effect) since they merely give the impression of intelligence but are little more than search engines. In the end all one is doing is displaying expected results based on a popularity algorithm. However they do this inconsistently due to bad data in and limited caching.
I mean, open AI seem to forget it isn’t.