It's like people who expect ChatGPT to be really good at chess because chess engines with super-human performance have been around for decades, so obviously the latest frontier LLM that took billions to train should find the task trivial.
Actually, I'm curious what ChatGPT 5.5's ELO is- I wouldn't be too surprised if it's 2000+ just from its basic understanding of chess principles from all the content it has digested.
ChatGPT is completely unplayable at chess on its own. It's unable to keep track of the state of the chess position and therefore will make an illegal move within about 10-12 moves. I would put GPT-5.5's rating at 400, since it can't even make legal moves reliably.
I've tried to pay chess with GPT-5.5, even played it again tonight, allowing it to use `python-chess` to keep track of the state of the position and to get a list of legal moves at each turn, so that it was fair. I also gave it blindfold odds, again to make it a fair fight, but it was not even close. GPT still isn't better than maybe 1000 Elo, maybe 1200 tops. Even with what amounts to being able to see the position and also being unable to make an illegal move, GPT-5.5 hangs material left and right, doesn't make a plan, and got smoked even when I gave it blindfold odds, to the point it's boring for me to play even under those conditions. I'm not sure it's better than whatever the GPT model was that was out about 8 months ago. I also thought it might be somewhat better than a beginner due to reading chess books, but no, it's complete garbage at playing chess, not even average-level skill.
Interestingly LLMs are extremely bad at chess position _images_. I have to imagine if you give it positions in text it'd be pretty great but when I was learning chess and pasting images of positions in for analysis I couldn't believe how wrong it was. I actually thought it was looking at the board in reverse but even when pointing out problems it seemed completely incapable of understanding what it was missing (of course... it doesn't really "understand" anything).
LLMs truly are marvels with text but anything spatial seems to really mess it up, somehow.
> I have to imagine if you give it positions in text it'd be pretty great
Not at all? LLMs are a terrible match for the kind of analysis a chess engine does (scaled deep search, deeply trained position evaluations). It's just not that kind of tool.
Actually, I'm curious what ChatGPT 5.5's ELO is- I wouldn't be too surprised if it's 2000+ just from its basic understanding of chess principles from all the content it has digested.