Can an A.I. Make Plans?

Last summer, AdamYedidia, a user on a Web forum called LessWrong, published a post titled "Chess as a Case Study in Hidden Capabilities in ChatGPT." He started by noting that the Internet is filled with funny videos of ChatGPT playing bad chess: in one popular clip, the A.I. confidently and illegally moves a pawn backward. But many of these videos were made using the original version of OpenAI's chatbot, which was released to the public in late November, 2022, and was based on the GPT-3.5 large language model. Last March, OpenAI introduced an enhanced version of ChatGPT based on the more powerful GPT-4. As the post demonstrated, this new model, if prompted correctly, could play a surprisingly decent game of chess, achieving something like an Elo rating of 1000--better than roughly fifty per cent of ranked players.