Livestream with Jennifer Shahade!
Here's how to join
Hey, just wanted to give you a heads up about an exciting event. Tomorrow I’ll be doing a livestream with Jennifer Shahade on the topic of chess-playing LLMs, starting at Friday 5pm EST.
You probably know Jennifer. She’s a a two-time US Women’s Chess Champion, poker pro, New York Times-published author, and generally one of the more fascinating people you’ll meet.
At first it might not be obvious why it’s a big deal that LLMs can play chess. After all, we’ve had chess playing computers for many years now. But while engines like Stockfish and Leela are purpose-built to play chess, LLMs are trained by reading text on the internet. The fact that they can play chess at all is kind of bizarre.
Except…can they? They usually play legal moves, but not always; they blunder in ways that seem uncannily human; sometimes they hallucinate and insist on pieces or moves that don’t exist.
Nor are they all the same. Some LLMs play better than others. Google recently hosted a tournament between eight LLMs, livestreamed by Levy Rozman, Hikaru Nakamura, and Magnus Carlsen. ChatGPT-o3 beat Grok in the final.
You hear some scary predictions about LLMs. Some very smart people think they’re poised to hit a period of runaway growth, take over the world, and wipe out humanity. Could chess hold some kind of clue as to whether this is actually going to happen?
It’s such an interesting (and creepy) topic, I really cannot wait to discuss it with Jennifer.
If you’d like to start learning more right away, check out Jennifer’s excellent piece:
How to Join
To participate in this event live, you’ll need the Substack app on your phone. Click the button below to download it.
Once you’ve got the app, make sure you’re subscribed to me and have push notifications enabled. You’ll get an alert when we go live.
I’ll also make the recording available after the event, but if you want to have the chance to interact with Jennifer and me, make sure to tune in live.
See you soon!