because it wasn't trained to play chess

imagine a hypothetical chess match between:

- an undoubtedly very intelligent person. in the course of their studies, they have read about different chess strategies, openings, etc. but they never actually played the game themselves

- an average person with a year of chess playing experience

who do you think is going to win? of course, you could give the LLM time to think and consider its opponents potential next moves, but this is a computationally expensive way to play the game that doesn't scale

which is all beside the point that chess isn't a very good proxy for general intelligence. there is a correlation, but it's very weak