Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, and really it's because computing power is so amazing and there's so many techniques for how to do deep evaluation on specific chess lines. They can calculate tens of millions per second. So it's not realistic for a human to compete against that. But yet, watching some of these chess engines played has opened up a lot of creativity, new strategies, new lines, new appreciation for the game. And our chess.com approach is that we can bring this technology for every user. Even people that have never moved a piece before. I talked earlier about that game review product, that's exactly what this does. So behind the scenes, we're running chess engines to basically spit out evaluations for every move that you make. And then we translate that and make that approachable to the user using their native language and plain approachable style, and even with audio and things like that as well. And that part of it, the personality, the speech back to the user, that part is LLMs. And so I guess my point is that, again, chess and AI have been intertwined forever, but for us, what's most important is that we keep the customer at the North Star of it. We're not just applying LLMs just because the new hot thing, you've got to apply the right technology for the right feature to provide value to the user. And so we try not to ever lose sight of that and let hype get us too carried away. It's just really surprising. I think people would not have expected AI and cannot beat every human alive ever. And chess is at an all-time high. People want to keep playing and are playing more and more than ever played, not unexpected. Interestingly, LLMs themselves are quite bad at playing chess. They hallucinate moves, they look at patterns. They're very good at pattern recognition, but not so good at going super, super, super deep on a specific chest thing. And if you've even tried to create or look at chessboard images on ChatGPT, a lot of them have the wrong number of squares. They're not set up properly, and so I don't want to be too dismissive. I'm sure it's going to get much stronger at reasoning. And actually, Google recently sponsored a tournament where all the top LLMs played a tournament against each other. So that was pretty fun to watch. They're improving, but chess is specifically a game that having a trained deep, deep computing engine is just going to be much, much, much more powerful than LLMs.…

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