Despite all its advances, ChatGPT is seemingly still less smart — at certain tasks, at least — than an Atari game console from almost 50 years ago.
In a post on LinkedIn, Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso explained how the OpenAI chatbot “got absolutely wrecked” by an Atari 2600 running Atari Chess, a game for the system released in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still president.
Launched in 1977, the Atari 2600 — also marketed at the time as the Atari Video Computer System — popularized at-home gaming after Atari released its “Pong” console two years prior. Still, that system was released some 21 years after the MANIAC I supercomputer became the first machine in history to defeat a human at modified chess, so you’d think that after another few decades, our cutting-edge tech would destroy the primordial Atari.
