Researchers asked frontier models to play chess. Have a look at the MAR rates in Table 3. When not explicitly told which moves were legal, no model identified legal moves at a rate better than 80%. Many asked for more illegal moves than legal moves. And even when explicitly told which moves were legal, the models continued to ask for illegal moves. With illegal asks discarded, none of the bots could beat a chess model calibrated to 1100 ELO.
The author of the originating post says that "current frontier models need laborious oversight and guardrails on even the simplest tasks", and he's absolutely correct.
> Gemini 2.5 Pro, O3, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and ChatGPT 4.1
The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. I would not trust that any conclusions they made are applicable.
It's also worth noting that the very latest models (GPT-6 and Fable 5.1) actually play worse than their immediate predecessors, so it is likely that the labs are not benchmaxxing for this yet. If they did, I'm sure they could come up with something superior to humans. But there is probably very little demand for this compared to IT stuff.
I know HN readers and posters just read numbers and can't be bothered to read, but please read the methodology before making any claims.
> About their ELO ratings from their own website:
> A field-relative rating calculated within ChessBench. It compares performance among the tested models and is not a direct equivalent of a human chess rating.
I am around 1600 elo in over the board I can mop up Astra Fable etc even if I give them literal infinite time and all the subagents and internet access..
Please folks at least use your AIs to read stuff before making claims.
AI is not GM level, it's not even 1600, I am 1600 by using memorized openings people frequently fall for with very basic intuitions.
A GM is 2600 they can beat me in under 20 moves...
Why do I even scroll through this website. For a moment I truly felt fooled, but then I read like a human should.
Maybe I should stop doing that will be a happier life, don't think just believe in the AGI.
The AI can write a chess bot program that will beat you.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The system is built and delivered as it is because that's how the providers make the most money. If they cared to have it perform well in chess games, you'd see a different shape and behavior.
We shouldn't ask the multibillion dollar automated software generation system to play games with us any more than we should ask a Boeing's flight guidance system to do so.
I'm pretty sure "competent at chess without external aids" has been on the standard AGI checklist since before personal computers were a thing. How can you claim an intelligence is general if it can't make sense of such a highly constrained board game?
Because they’ll train it to be good at chess and then everyone will say yeah but playing chess doesn’t mean you’re AGI, it can’t even ____
It can’t even count the R’s in strawberry
It can’t even add numbers
It can’t even solve a millennium puzzle
It’s not even a chess GM
It’s not even beyond human capability in Go
It can’t even drive a car
It can’t even self replicate
It can’t even build weapons
It doesn’t even have feelings
So how could someone conceivably convince everyone that some system is AGI when there are still tasks that some human or group of humans can do that the system cannot?
This will only happen, in my opinion, when the model/system can self-improve at a rate that scares people.
> and then everyone will say yeah but playing chess doesn’t mean you’re AGI, it can’t even
One, you're not addressing what I wrote above and two, yes, that's absolutely correct. Doing X doesn't qualify something as AGI. If you can't X you can't be AGI. The inverse doesn't hold though. In particular if you have to retain the model in order to X then it can't possibly be AGI since (being _general_) it would be capable of figuring X out on its own having never seen it before.
Yes, it is indeed self evident. If it can't figure things out then its intelligence isn't general in which case it can't be AGI by definition.
No, because there is no coherent, agreed-upon definition. There’s just a million people vibe defining it.
Even if they solve 99% of whatever problems LLMs have, the 1% will remain the goal post, forever.
Until you get RFC-whatever from some standards body that defines what an AGI system is, it’s pointless to argue about whether something fits your own personal definition or not.
And for what it’s worth I just watched GitHub Copilot figure something out. So your definition is once again lacking.
Throughout this exchange you're repeatedly confusing the negative and the positive. There is no rigorous and universally agreed upon criteria for exactly what would constitute AGI. There are some vague shapes that are widely (but not universally) accepted such as largely (vague boundary) being capable of replacing (vague criteria) humans.
However there are plenty of disqualifiers that are more or less universally accepted. In the above case it is literally by definition. Something cannot be termed general if it is incapable of generalizing.
> However there are plenty of disqualifiers that are more or less universally accepted (ie the negative)
Which is exactly the point I’ve made repeatedly, there will always be something that they cannot do, and thus there will never be AGI. There will always be a long tail of capabilities that whatever system is created doesn’t have, and a long line of social media commenters eager to list them.
An AI controlled robot will be standing over the cooling corpse of the last human who will die certain that it wasn’t done by AGI.
carodgers · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2509.24239v4" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/2509.24239v4
Researchers asked frontier models to play chess. Have a look at the MAR rates in Table 3. When not explicitly told which moves were legal, no model identified legal moves at a rate better than 80%. Many asked for more illegal moves than legal moves. And even when explicitly told which moves were legal, the models continued to ask for illegal moves. With illegal asks discarded, none of the bots could beat a chess model calibrated to 1100 ELO.
The author of the originating post says that "current frontier models need laborious oversight and guardrails on even the simplest tasks", and he's absolutely correct.
joefourier · · focus · HN ↗
> Gemini 2.5 Pro, O3, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and ChatGPT 4.1
The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. I would not trust that any conclusions they made are applicable.
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://chessbench-ai.github.io/#leaderboard" rel="nofollow">https://chessbench-ai.github.io/#leaderboard
It's also worth noting that the very latest models (GPT-6 and Fable 5.1) actually play worse than their immediate predecessors, so it is likely that the labs are not benchmaxxing for this yet. If they did, I'm sure they could come up with something superior to humans. But there is probably very little demand for this compared to IT stuff.
minraws · · focus · HN ↗
> About their ELO ratings from their own website:
> A field-relative rating calculated within ChessBench. It compares performance among the tested models and is not a direct equivalent of a human chess rating.
I am around 1600 elo in over the board I can mop up Astra Fable etc even if I give them literal infinite time and all the subagents and internet access..
Please folks at least use your AIs to read stuff before making claims.
AI is not GM level, it's not even 1600, I am 1600 by using memorized openings people frequently fall for with very basic intuitions.
A GM is 2600 they can beat me in under 20 moves...
Why do I even scroll through this website. For a moment I truly felt fooled, but then I read like a human should.
Maybe I should stop doing that will be a happier life, don't think just believe in the AGI.
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The system is built and delivered as it is because that's how the providers make the most money. If they cared to have it perform well in chess games, you'd see a different shape and behavior.
We shouldn't ask the multibillion dollar automated software generation system to play games with us any more than we should ask a Boeing's flight guidance system to do so.
what · · focus · HN ↗
>If they cared to have it perform well in chess games, you'd see a different shape and behavior.
So the things they claim are on the verge of AGI actually aren’t? They need to be trained for specific tasks?
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
It can’t even count the R’s in strawberry
It can’t even add numbers
It can’t even solve a millennium puzzle
It’s not even a chess GM
It’s not even beyond human capability in Go
It can’t even drive a car
It can’t even self replicate
It can’t even build weapons
It doesn’t even have feelings
So how could someone conceivably convince everyone that some system is AGI when there are still tasks that some human or group of humans can do that the system cannot?
This will only happen, in my opinion, when the model/system can self-improve at a rate that scares people.
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
One, you're not addressing what I wrote above and two, yes, that's absolutely correct. Doing X doesn't qualify something as AGI. If you can't X you can't be AGI. The inverse doesn't hold though. In particular if you have to retain the model in order to X then it can't possibly be AGI since (being _general_) it would be capable of figuring X out on its own having never seen it before.
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
Even if they solve 99% of whatever problems LLMs have, the 1% will remain the goal post, forever.
Until you get RFC-whatever from some standards body that defines what an AGI system is, it’s pointless to argue about whether something fits your own personal definition or not.
And for what it’s worth I just watched GitHub Copilot figure something out. So your definition is once again lacking.
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
However there are plenty of disqualifiers that are more or less universally accepted. In the above case it is literally by definition. Something cannot be termed general if it is incapable of generalizing.
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
Which is exactly the point I’ve made repeatedly, there will always be something that they cannot do, and thus there will never be AGI. There will always be a long tail of capabilities that whatever system is created doesn’t have, and a long line of social media commenters eager to list them.
An AI controlled robot will be standing over the cooling corpse of the last human who will die certain that it wasn’t done by AGI.
cindyllm · · focus · HN ↗
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