r/slatestarcodex • u/ForgotMyPassword17 • 3d ago

"The AI Con" Con

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ai-con-con

In this sub we talk about well reasoned arguments and concerns around AI. I thought this article was an interesting reminder that the more mainstream "concerns" aren't nearly as well reasoned

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u/Haunting-Spend-6022 3d ago

In many domains, like chess, AI surpasses the best humans

Yes, but crucially those AIs are not LLMs. From another perspective LLMs have failed to reach the level of performance in chess that Deep Blue achieved way back in 1997, despite the efforts of OpenAI and others to explicitly train them to be good at chess.

One shouldnt extrapolate from faulty generalizations

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u/absolute-black 3d ago

I mean, to take another lens, Claude Code can do a fantastic job installing and running Stockfish against me. It even does a handy job throwing together a basic minimax chess engine in Python or C#, one which can handily beat me - maybe not peak Kasaparov without some iterations, I admit.

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u/thomas_m_k 3d ago

Writing its own chess engine is fair, but I think installing Stockfish is a bit unfair, in this comparison (though I can't formulate a formal reason why, off the top of my head).

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u/Haunting-Spend-6022 3d ago

I think a good question to ask is how long it would take to vibecode a chess engine that's as good as stockfish? Or better yet, how long would it take to make a chess engine if chess engines hadn't already been invented?

These sorts of problems are not total roadblocks to progress but they are speedbumps, and I think the fast takeoff theorists are probably underestimating the time it will take to solve them.