Chess

“The interesting thing is chess is like, Not patentable. There's, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands of chess apps in the app store and chess websites. And you know, at the end of the day, really product is going to win out and community and content.”

“Fundamentally humans want to do human stuff. That's, you know, humans competing against other humans. It's humans making things. It's human solving problems. And there's certain areas where, you know, machines have gotten better than humans at things, but it r…”

“Computers at first made chess a little bit more boring, but then made it so much more exciting. And we're seeing more exciting chess than we ever have. And the players have gotten better and really computers are now able to help us unlock the game in ways that…”

“When there's infinite music, sometimes people go back to like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin because it's like the classics that everyone can kind of rally around and have a shared experience. And I think that's the same about chess is like, You know, there's no…”

“And so what we see is that, you know, sometimes it will consider a move. It will realize it's a blunder, but it can't find anything better, so it kind of goes back to that move and does it anyway.”

“Surely that immense collective mental effort should have been harnessed to some higher cause, say science or medicine. I thought we were wasting our minds.”

“When we taught AI to play chess, the way it learns, if you start it from just knowing nothing, and it plays against itself billions of times throughout a day, it actually goes through some of the more popular historical openings that people were liked too, and…”

“There's a data point that the people playing chess is up since computers got better at human than humans at chess.”

“You know, interestingly, LLMs themselves are quite bad at playing chess. Like they hallucinate moves. They look at patterns, right? They're very good at pattern recognition, but not so good at going super, super, super deep on a specific chess thing.”

“Our experience with doing this is, was with math and music before. It was triple the amount of people and double the amount of time it takes to get a course out.”

“And, you know, I take all the criticism, including death threats, I take it as a sign of how much people love chess and how passionate they are.”

“It's very inefficient because the system has to try many things before it gets the correct answer. And so, It's very inefficient. It requires many, many, many trials. And so it works really well for games. You know, you, it's very efficient. If you want to tra…”

“No one bets on chess because it's so obvious who's going to win. There's like a very precise rating system and so in poker, the poker is very different because you can have players at the same table and you know, who are the great players who are not the great…”

“People say chess is the king of games. Well, chess has a bunch of problems with it relative to parallels to the real world. The bad thing is it's epistemologically shared, which is we both see the same board. It has no randomness, and actually, in fact, you mi…”

“People go back to the classics and for a little bit of just like safety. I mean, my kids listen to music from generations past because there's something that's like just classic about that. And I think that chess will be the fallback Of the greatest strategy g…”

“I think this is one of the learnings from chess, is that you want to get good at chess, you probably have to spend the most amount of time looking at the games you lost, because there's something you didn't understand about that game, or somebody understood be…”

“It's not like, because you're good at chess, you'll be good at poker, but it's more like the kind of people who are good at chess tend to be good at poker.”

“In a chess game, if I lose it, the next round, tomorrow, I'm the same chess player. But investing, if I've lost money today, I have less money tomorrow to invest with. And the problem with a lot of people in investing is that they're, to become a decent invest…”

“Like we also found in chess and go, we actually ran this experiment. If you do. Just pure supervised learning on a giant data set of human chess and go games. The bot that you get out from that is not an expert chess or go player. Even if it's like conditioned…”

“Eventually I'd imagine that these systems become so strong that, like, it kind of goes the way of chess, where, like, the human's just kind of, like, adding a marginal difference at the end.”

“And I should also say like the way professional poker players train now, They all use bots to assist them. It's a lot like chess where you play the game and then you have a bot analyze your play at the afterwards and see like, okay, did you make mistakes? Wher…”

“I kind of describe poker as essentially high dimensional chess. It's chess. It's like chess where you have to reason about like a probability distribution over actions instead of just like discrete actions.”

“I think that the offline world needs to sort of learn more from the gaming world about anti-cheat, because there's these companies that are quite big that are anti-cheat providers to all games, because each game individually can't build the security system tha…”

“Now, poker is meaningfully more complicated than chess, as it turns out, because again, you have, you're not playing against one player, you're playing against some umpteen number of players.”

“Word games are all, I think they're almost as big, if not, I think it would be, I wouldn't be shocked if it was bigger than chess, I wouldn't be shocked, I would be more shocked if it was like a 10th the size of the chess enthusiast audience I would guess it's…”

“So the way I think about the difference between complicated and complex would actually be the difference between chess and poker. So a complicated decision is one that's hard. It's got a lot of levels. It's very deep, but there is a solution. So whatever groun…”

“And really, to be great at business, it's like being great at chess, and you have to anticipate which series of things, seven, eight moves down, are likely to happen, And by the time in chess you go seven or eight moves, the tree of possibilities, you know, is…”

“And in four hours, that program leapfrogged all existing human knowledge of the game, and has a chess rating of, hard to estimate, like, 36, 3700, compared with 3300.”

“Video games are awesome, but we should not be aspiring to be as successful as a successful movie, right? We should be looking at the history of, like, look at chess. Look at Go. Look at poker. Look at basketball. And that's what games can do, right? They can b…”

“You want to really figure out what are your mistakes. You're like, most of the time, not making the best chess move, intellectually speaking. And if you face up to that, you'll improve. If not, at some point, you'll ossify, and you can play devalue and dismiss…”

“The best chess players in the world today are what are called centaurs in the community. They're a team of a human and a computer. So a human and a computer can actually, together, can actually beat the computer.”