> I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear
There is almost always a large amount of time and effort invested behind the scenes in exactly how to message things like this. That being the case, there is almost always some insight to be had criticizing and analyzing what they settled on.
Why? It's idiomatic to math. There's a lot to hate about math notation (use more than one letter in your variable names!) but "let" for declaring variables seems harmless.
If I'm going to pick a bone about modern programming language conventions it's the prevalence of = for assignment and == for equality that grinds my gears.
Declarative knowledge is not the same as procedural knowledge. You can read as many chess tutorials, strategy documentation and game archives as you like, they won't make you good at chess until you actually start practicing chess.
The issue with the models isn't that they play a bad game, but that they persist in making illegal moves. An average intelligent human can be told the rules of chess and then play chess, badly, within the rules.
Sure, but the LLM is free to construct a representation of the chess board and update it as it goes along. It is not in any way banned from using a virtual board, or whatever representation of game state it pleases.
AFAIK, current models will still sometimes make illegal moves even if given the entire game state (e.g. in FEN notation), so it is not purely an issue with the models’ ability to keep track of sequences of moves.
My point was you are misunderstanding G, or at least applying it erroneously here. Being good at chess is not a generalization of any other body of knowledge, it is a rigorous set of rules. The only way to be good at chess is to practice chess, or to apply deep calculations. The latter is the model writing code.
The illegal move aspect has more to do with a failure of online/in-context learning, which would support your point. I tend to think it is a byproduct of reasoning in language, which newer architectures would fix, but we shall see.
chess is not just a rigorous set of rules, it is rules as foundation with layers of strategy on top. and so is, for example, scientific methodology or chemical interactions or virtually everything else under-the-sun that comprises human knowledge
knowledge for chess is derived from memorizing strategies that have been well-defined for decades paired with in-game reasoning processes. this is not at all different from any other body of knowledge. Noble gases, laws of thermodynamics, organic chemistry just to name a few - these are all 'strategies' that define observed phenomena, analytical frameworks that trace a logical, rational set of interactions and which can predict the next
for an AGI, all of this should be a cakewalk, trained as it were to surpass human capability in any and every domain [0] (thus the G for 'general' and not 'N' for 'narrow' [1]). it should be a natural at everything, infinitely adaptable on-the-fly. the whole point of AGI is that it surpasses human capabilities even at our frontiers and bleeding edge (unless you're private enterprise and you've moved the goalposts for industry [2])
currently, it's only AGI-seeming if it gets benchmaxxed enough. otherwise it sucks at what it does and then is only barely competent at tasks if paired with enough skills and tests to make it more diligent at its work. this makes sense to me - for any probabilistically trained tool, even one that you post-train and fill with nothing but the best-quality evidence, the ultimate result is the lowest-common-denominator output for your sample set. there's no natural reasoning the AI does itself to make itself better at what it does - it's all human curation and categorization of sources ingested paired with RLHF post-training that we can get the mediocre-at-chess-at-best results that we see now and the benchmaxxed scores against whatever arbitrary and pre-defined measure
that's not AGI by any classical definition. that's a cool, useful, and powerful tool that makes our lives easier, much like a hammer, nail, and studs make mounting a picture frame easier than if we only had our hands alone
I'm not. AGI is almost necessarily closer to ASI than it is to human intelligence by definition. it's become pretty obvious that even what seems like irrelevant domain knowledge has utility applied to other domains - that's why we're pursuing general-use models
presumably, an 'AGI' that is generally as good as a really good human at every task under-the-sun will already be much better than most humans at the task because it can incorporate cross-domain knowledge and apply it in a reasonable fashion. it's like the parable of Newton and the apple - the domain knowledge that an apple falls according to certain rules observed through historic experience igniting the creative spark that led to universal gravitation
> presumably, an 'AGI' that is generally as good as a really good human at every task under-the-sun will already be much better than most humans at the task because it can incorporate cross-domain knowledge and apply it in a reasonable fashion.
I disagree with this definition of AGI, and I disagree that chess skills significantly benefit from generalizing non-chess knowledge, outside of computing moves probabilistically.
AGI has historically been defined as human level or better, with generality to new domains. I think blurring it with ASI makes the terminology confusing to use.
Chess is learned rules and the ability to apply those rules. Strategy as a whole is applying a set of rules to circumstances, that's how it is taught: "here are examples of circumstances and actions, try to pattern match to future circumstance and apply commensurate action."
If you make the point that chess is a large part of the training data, or that LLMs are unable to learn chess well, I'll accept that as refuting that LLMs are AGI, but these other points I disagree with.
I don't think the agreements played any important role outside of limiting tests. I highly doubt agreements about nukes in particular have meaningfully curbed risks of their use. MAD has played a much larger role in that, and MAD is kind of the antithesis of control agreements, it is the natural equilibrium in the game.
> This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year.
I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. Opus 4.5 needed a lot of handholding not to work itself into a corner pretty quickly. Fable I basically never need to correct, and I've most become a data source.
1) The US is not the only country to deploy chemical weapons. Are you forgetting all of WW1? It's the whole reason chemical weapons are a no-no now.
2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.
Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.
2 - is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...
They didn't gas people with chlorine or mustard, but they mass destroyed crops and foliage, to kill people.
And "affected US troops as much as Vietnamese" is just completely incorrect, US covered a nation in herbicide, went home, got cancer. Is completely different then having your soil destroyed for decades.
"Can be used as a weapon" applies to nearly everything, and ceases to have any meaning. Even on a tank, they aren't considered a weapon, only the whole take together is the weapon, or the cannon alone.
Chemical weapons didn't work well in WW1. The reason we don't see any chemical weapons around is because they are not really effective. Germans accidentally gassed a bunch of their own guys, while failing to use chemical weapons to achieve anything in the war.
I feel like today's Pentagon would be fine with gassing our own troops to achieve nothing.
"No Tab Pete" has no regard for servicemembers, or previous expertise. Only your testosterone levels, ability to not eat, and blind loyalty to serve political party over country and constitution.
The civilian cost was intentionally not part of the equation. The toxic effects were known and the numbers show that it was not a few isolated accidents but a intentional disregard for the human cost.
The toxic effects also impacted the area where I grew up here in the Southern US - there’s a road that’s known locally as “Chemical Ranch Rd” where there’s a ~100 acre property that was used for testing Agent Orange.
"no see they didn't use it to give people cancer, they merely wanted to make the land they lived in so uninhabitable and devoid of life that staying there would mean death either by starvation or bombing"
I'm not sure what you're responding to. If you are making the claim that Agent Orange was indeed a chemical weapon, I'd disagree, but I think either perspective has points.
WW2 is notable for not seeing widespread deployment of chemical weapons. Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chemical_warfare#Wo... this (a) overlooks the widespread use of chemical weapons in the Pacific theater, and (b) ascribes the non-use by Germany to humanitarian reasons, which is largely speculative. Actual quotes from officers discuss far more practical reasons: Germany feared chemical retaliation, and the horses relied upon for logistics could not be outfitted with sufficiently performant gas masks.
Entirely untrue in the Pacific theatre, with the Japanese doing human experiments both with germ and chemical agents. The largest scale use I remember was where they released infected rats (forget where) in a certain Chinese city to cause a plague.
I'm not arguing we were the good guys in Vietnam, just that calling Agent Orange a chemical weapon is a shaky claim. Not sure why you're putting so many other words in my mouth.
> We must pursue advancements in AI to protect us against advancements in AI
Is this not true of technology as a whole? Very little of technology's breadth exists at the human interface. Most of it is made specifically to interface with other technologies, either to make them safer or increase their capabilities. That AI is making AI safer and more useful is no more notable than trucks being used to build roads.
You can't ignore the impact of China also becoming a better place to live as well. China is a different place no than it was 20 years ago, and the need to go overseas anywhere is probably felt less today than back then.
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