AI Beats the Clock

Tue, 12 May 2026 12:00:00 -0700

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, who was the world’s best chess player at the time.

Almost 30 years later, the insight that sticks with me is this: Deep Blue didn’t defeat Kasparov. It defeated the clock.

Deep Blue did not understand chess in any meaningful way. Under the same clock, it just searched orders of magnitude more positions than Garry could.

That is where we are with LLMs.

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