Latest news with #RobertCaruso
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
ChatGPT may be the smartest software ever, but this Pong-era game console can do something it can't
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Technology. The ever-advancing pinnacle of the processor. It's a modern-day blessing to most, but dreaded by those convinced it's five minutes away from flipping society onto its head like an egg served sunny-side down. The word alone can strike fear into the hearts of man. Especially if you shout it loud enough into their ears as you pass them on the street. And, if you were to take a small break from harassing the general public and ask one of them to name today's most advanced piece of technology, they'd likely say ChatGPT — OpenAI's super-brainy chatbot, packed with enough artificial intelligence to seemingly make regular intelligence look like its eating glue from a pot in a sandbox. But if ChatGPT, the poster child for cutting-edge technology, is so smart, how did it just get absolutely bodied by a video game console released in 1977? When we think of competitors to ChatGPT, there's a usual list of suspects to choose from: Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI, and maybe even newcomer DeepSeek. What you wouldn't expect to appear in that list is the Atari 2600, a 48-year-old home video game console best known for bringing Pac-Man into the living rooms of millions of first-generation gamers. However, thanks to Citrix Engineer Robert Jr. Caruso, Atari's retro console can now be counted among ChatGPT's truest rivals, after it was used to repeatedly best OpenAI's GPT-4o model at a simple game of chess. In a now-viral post shared to LinkedIn, Caruso details his 90-minute experiment in pitting the computing might of tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs against the singular 1.19 MHz 8-bit MOS Technology 6507 processor of the Atari 2600, claiming ChatGPT "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club." Clearly, they don't make them like they used to. The prevalence of the 2600 over ChatGPT is a true David vs. Goliath battle on a checkerboard stage, and a surprising outcome to most. However, there's a chasm of difference between chatbot and a chess engine, meaning the Atari 2600, which ran not as hardware but through the Stella emulator, likely had ChatGPT's number from the start. While OpenAI has made great strides in improving its model's memory capabilities, it's still primarily a language prediction machine, and not the next Deep Blue. Still, given the 2600's ability to only predict two moves in advance, it does highlight ChatGPT's shortcomings, and provide a thumb to the virtual eye for OpenAI's world's most intelligent chatbot. At least it would do if OpenAI had ever claimed as much. In fact, it's more often than not proclaiming the opposite. Stretching back to 2023, in an episode of the Lex Friedman podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quick to label GPT-4 as "a very early AI. It's slow, it is buggy, and it does not do a lot of things very well." Then, in 2024, during a Q&A at Stanford University, Altman claimed that ChatGPT was running on "the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again by a lot." In fact, only recently has Altman pushed the message that AI is living up to its supposed smarts. In a blog post published on Tuesday, titled The Gentle Singularity, Altman predicts: "We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out." So yes, Atari's classic console may have bested ChatGPT this time, but if Altman's words are anything to go by, it could be a very short-lived victory. Sam Altman's vision is the stuff of my nightmares: "A significant fraction of the power on Earth should be spent running AI" Wikipedia editors revolt over "truly ghastly" plan for AI slop — they're winning (for now) Microsoft has created an after-the-fact AI gaffer -- but is your laptop up to snuff?
CNET
3 days ago
- CNET
ChatGPT Just Got 'Absolutely Wrecked' at Chess, Losing to a 1970s-Era Atari 2600
OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were -- first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post. "It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level." Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested that the match start over. For decades, the ability for computers to defeat humans at chess has been a measure of their power. In 1997, IBM made headlines when its Deep Blue technology defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a series of matches. Caruso's experiment doesn't mean ChatGPT is useless for chess, but because it's more of a language model than a supercomputer, it's less likely to serve that purpose well. A few years ago, a developer created a ChatGPT plugin called ChessGPT. But it may be better to discuss chess with OpenAI's chatbot than to try to play against it. A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
CNET
4 days ago
- CNET
ChatGPT Defeated at Chess by 1970s-Era Atari 2600
OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Add to that list: the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he wwas able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were -- first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post. "It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level." Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested the match start over. For decades, the ability for computers to defeat humans at chess has been a measure of their power. In 1997, IBM made headlines when its Deep Blue technology defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a series of matches. Caruso's experiment doesn't mean ChatGPT is useless for chess, but because it's more a language model than a supercomputer, it's less likely to serve that purpose well. A few years ago, a developer created a ChatGPT plugin called ChessGPT. But it may be better to discuss chess with OpenAI's chatbot than to try to play against it. A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
