The models listed in the paper are from early 2025 and are no longer relevant, much less on the frontier.
That Claude version is no longer available today, Gemini 2.5 Pro will be shutdown next month, and the OpenAI models are only available via the API today.
I'll say it till there is any evidence of the contrary, LLMs are not intelligent and their capabilities solely within the realms of well tailored training data. "Just" having been trained on every rule, strategy guide and likely most games of chess on the world wide web isn't even enough for an LLM to play that game reliably. Yet the same model could code a competitive chess engine, just like a model struggling to count can write advanced maths papers. Fascinating tools, but tools nonetheless.
Given the pace of improvements, is it really unimaginable that GPT-7 will play Chess reasonably well and generalize better?
I would not be surprised if OpenAI released a model that beats humans at chess this year.
Thing is, given what GPT-6 Astra was trained on and what models of a similar class can do (including developing a competitive chess engine), it is often paradoxical and somewhat surprising how little these models have gained in actually capability that is in the training data, but not RLHFd to hell, so to speak. Tracking the state of pieces, I suspect given similar in Sudoku [0], is what these models struggle with in game settings, whilst tracking the state of code changes can be reliable over 250k tokens. Essentially, for the latter they were trained in the specific manner that lead them to abstract the capability, but that doesn't track to the former, which is a massive difference between LLMs data focused training and human learning.
So yeah, GPT-7 or any upcoming/present LLM could do massively better in Chess than GPT-6 Astra, but not because the approach was emergent out of pure data. Rather, it requires a very specific training data type and stack for a model to gain capabilities that track a specific task long enough to adhere to the rules of a game such as chess.
[0] https://logicalintelligence.com/blog/energy-based-model-sudo...
It reminds me of the ARC-AGI-3 issue where not dropping the thinking tokens between turns or something like that + a new context compaction method increased the performance dramatically. However, I think that is not applicable here.
All I know is, AGI, as in actual intelligence, is quite a massive accomplishment to claim and we shouldn't loose sight of that fact, especially as "not being intelligent" does not make these models any less impressive, fascinating to work on or useful in many tasks. Personally, the only thing I am fairly convinced on is that if we were to find a way to create actual intelligence, it likely wouldn't start out as useful as todays LLMs are and may thus be dismissed early. But again, pure speculation on that front.
If for leap you just mean more utility from LLMs as they are, then I'll pretty confidently put my money on higher quality, not more, training data for a wide range of verifiable tasks. What makes maths, coding, etc. comparatively easy to make gains in (though less verifiable tasks can also make similar as seen with the writing in Kimi K2).
The regular model generally does not suffer the same issues he is demonstrating with the real time audio version.
In my view the investment into datacenters is well justified by the current demand, and progress has been very impressive.