Why LLMs still fail at chess may be a key test of how capabilities emerge
alex_peys · x · 2026-07-29
The post argues that chess is still a useful task for studying LLMs.
- Commercial LLMs still perform poorly at chess despite likely having seen huge amounts of chess material in pretraining.
- The author notes that direct SFT/RL on chess would obviously make models much stronger, and even small networks can reach a very high level with a short training run.
- The open question is whether chess ability can be extracted without brute-force task-specific verified rewards or behavior cloning.
Related event: Poor Chess Performance in Commercial LLMs Highlights Capability Bottlenecks(2 posts)→
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