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Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess

(dynomight.substack.com)
688 points crescit_eundo | 2 comments | 14 Nov 24 17:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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swiftcoder ◴[15 Nov 24 07:57 UTC] No.42144784[source]▶
I feel like the article neglects one obvious possibility: that OpenAI decided that chess was a benchmark worth "winning", special-cases chess within gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, and then neglected to add that special-case to follow-up models since it wasn't generating sustained press coverage.
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dmurray ◴[15 Nov 24 09:46 UTC] No.42145352[source]▶
This seems quite likely to me, but did they special case it by reinforcement training it into the LLM (which would be extremely interesting in how they did it and what its internal representation looks like) or is it just that when you make an API call to OpenAI, the machine on the other end is not just a zillion-parameter LLM but also runs an instance of Stockfish?
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shaky-carrousel ◴[15 Nov 24 09:56 UTC] No.42145408[source]▶
That's easy to test, invent a new chess variant and see how the model does.
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andy_ppp ◴[15 Nov 24 10:26 UTC] No.42145557[source]▶
You're imagining LLMs don't just regurgitate and recombine things they already know from things they have seen before. A new variant would not be in the dataset so would not be understood. In fact this is quite a good way to show LLMs are NOT thinking or understanding anything in the way we understand it.
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shaky-carrousel ◴[15 Nov 24 11:23 UTC] No.42145905[source]▶
Yes, that's how you can really tell if the model is doing real thinking and not recombinating things. If it can correctly play a novel game, then it's doing more than that.
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timdiggerm ◴[15 Nov 24 12:12 UTC] No.42146190[source]▶
By that standard (and it is a good standard), none of these "AI" things are doing any thinking
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Jerrrrrrry ◴[15 Nov 24 14:51 UTC] No.42147408[source]▶
musical goalposts, gotta love it.

These LLM's just exhibited agency.

Swallow your pride.

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1. samatman ◴[15 Nov 24 15:52 UTC] No.42147976[source]▶
"Does it generalize past the training data" has been a pre-registered goalpost since before the attention transformer architecture came on the scene.
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2. Jerrrrrrry ◴[15 Nov 24 16:29 UTC] No.42148394[source]▶

  >'thinking' vs 'just recombinating things
If there is a difference, and LLM's can do one but not the other...

  >By that standard (and it is a good standard), none of these "AI" things are doing any thinking

  >"Does it generalize past the training data" has been a pre-registered goalpost since before the attention transformer architecture came on the scene.
Then what the fuck are they doing.

Learning is thinking, reasoning, what have you.

Move goalposts, re-define words, it won't matter.