Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess

I don't understand why educated people expect that an LLM would be able to play chess at a decent level.

It has no idea about the quality of it's data. "Act like x" prompts are no substitute for actual reasoning and deterministic computation which clearly chess requires.

This is a puzzle given enough training information. LLM can successfully print out the status of the board after the given moves. It can also produce a not-terrible summary of the position and is able to list dangers at least one move ahead. Decent is subjective, but that should beat at least beginners. And the lowest level of stockfish used in the blog post is lowest intermediate.

I don't know really what level we should be thinking of here, but I don't see any reason to dismiss the idea. Also, it really depends on whether you're thinking of the current public implementations of the tech, or the LLM idea in general. If we wanted to get better results, we could feed it way more chess books and past game analysis.