Chess is 'more interesting' with AI, International Grandmaster says

Chess is 'more interesting' with AI, International Grandmaster says

Artificial intelligence is nothing new in the world of chess. The game has been at the center of AI research for decades - and it "just keeps getting better," International Grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff tells Yahoo Finance. Rogoff, who is also the Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics at Harvard University, doesn't see artificial intelligence as bad for chess. "It's actually made it more interesting so far," he says. Having seen how fast AI evolved within the game, Rogoff predicts applications like ChatGPT will be unrecognizable in five years. Advancements will come "faster than you think," but if the experience of chess is any indication, the technology's evolution won't be as "detrimental" as some may fear. Rogoff also spoke with Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Brad Smith about Fitch's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the outlook on inflation in a wide-ranging conversation.

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Yahoo Finance

Wed, August 9, 2023, 6:38 AM GMT+9

Having seen how fast AI evolved within the game, Rogoff predicts applications like ChatGPT will be unrecognizable in five years. Advancements will come "faster than you think," but if the experience of chess is any indication, the technology's evolution won't be as "detrimental" as some may fear.

Rogoff also spoke with Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Brad Smith about Fitch's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the outlook on inflation in a wide-ranging conversation.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: There is a link between chess and one of the big things-- themes that we've talked a lot about every day, although we haven't talked about it yet. And that is artificial intelligence. And AlphaZero was, for many, one of the original big AI breakthroughs back in 2017. It was a computer program developed by AI research company DeepMind to master the game of chess. I'm sure you're familiar with that. So I'm curious about your take on AI, both as it relates to chess but also as it relates to our lives right now.

KENNETH ROGOFF: Well, first as it relates to chess, I mean, chess has been at the center of artificial intelligence research since the '60s and '70s. And I knew Richard Greenblatt, who was a pioneer at MIT in the '70s, played his program Ken Thompson, who's now at Google. And this is-- this was one of the most popular events in any AI conference for a very long time.

Indeed, as you say, the DeepMind program, which eventually Google bought, was a phenomenal breakthrough. And what's been interesting, I think, to chess players is it just keeps getting better. They thought computers were gods in 2000. And then the DeepMind came along, and it was even better. So the rate of improvement is phenomenal.