ChatGPT Kept 'Begging To Restart' Before Being Beaten By 1979 Atari 2600 In A 'Beginner Level' Chess Showdown

An Atari 2600 chess cartridge has humiliated OpenAI's vaunted ChatGPT, highlighting the limits that large language models still face outside pure text.

What Happened: Citrix engineer Robert Caruso pitted ChatGPT-4o against Video Chess (1979) through an emulator and watched the bot "get absolutely wrecked on the beginner level," he wrote on LinkedIn.

Caruso said the 90-minute match went downhill immediately: the bot "confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were," first blaming Atari's pixel icons and then floundering even after he switched to algebraic notation.

The system begged to restart several times before the 1.19 MHz console sealed the win.

Chess has long served as a yardstick for machine intelligence. IBM's IBM Deep Blue dethroned the world champion, then Garry Kasparov, in 1997, but ChatGPT is a language generator and not a search-heavy chess engine, and therefore unlikely to serve that purpose well.

See also: Apple Study Asks Whether AI Can Think For Itself: Experts Say Its Limits Are Human-Made

Developers have tried to bridge the gap with plugins such as ChessGPT, yet the model still stumbles at board-state memory and legal-move tracking, as Caruso states.

Why It Matters: The flop arrives as ChatGPT jostles with Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG Google's Gemini, Microsoft's MSFT Copilot and Anthropic's Claude for everyday users. Alphabet recently expanded new Gemini AI additions to its search engine. OpenAI, for its part, rolled out a more "reliable" GPT-o3 Pro model earlier this week, hoping to keep developers loyal.

OpenAI on Monday said its annualized revenue run rate has climbed to $10 billion, nearly doubling the $5.5 billion it posted at the end of 2024. The figure, which excludes Microsoft licensing fees and other one-off deals, reflects recurrent sales driven by ChatGPT's growing base of 500 million weekly active users as of March.

The company is reportedly seeking up to $40 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round that could push its valuation to $300 billion. Rival Anthropic, backed by Amazon AMZN and Alphabet, has crossed a $3 billion run-rate after securing $3.5 billion in capital, giving it a $61.5 billion valuation.

Image via Shutterstock

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