A few months ago, I was waiting for the subway with a friend, a professional editor, who had never used a large language model (LLM). Standing on the platform, she told me about an article she’d been working on. ChatGPT had come out 6 weeks earlier, and I input her summary into it on my phone and showed her the result. I’d been following OpenAI’s transformer-driven models since 2019 and had forgotten the effect they can have on first exposure. My friend couldn’t take her eyes off the little gray box as the article came out, line by line. It took me a minute to register the shock on her face. On the train, she said, only half-joking, “I’m going to be unemployed by the end of the year.”…I caught up with my editor friend again recently—three months after her first exposure to ChatGPT. She seemed more concerned than ever.
“I just think it’s going to be a hard fall”, she said. She felt the younger, more technically adept nipping at her heels and was worried she hadn’t been brought up to be resilient enough for this kind of challenge.
I tried to offer hope in the form of a story that Gregory Clark, a professor emeritus at UC Davis, told me about aristocratic land owners during the Industrial Revolution. Tenant farmers abandoning the country to follow better wages into factories in the city caused the value of the aristocrats’ farmland to drop, causing massive losses for the aristocracy. The smart aristocrats, though, said Clark—the ones who could adapt—simply followed the farmers into the cities and became urban landlords. My friend was only partly sold. What was the equivalent now, for her?
…That’s when I remembered a third Go champion who played AlphaGo but wasn’t included in the documentary. This is Ke Jie. In 2017, months after the Lee match, he was 19 years old and the best player in the world, having beaten Lee in 3 consecutive championships. Like Fan and Lee, Ke also lost to AlphaGo, after which AlphaGo had no human left to beat.
But Ke’s reaction is, I think, the most interesting and also the most hopeful. Pre-AlphaGo, Ke, a teenager of world-class abilities, was also a world-class brat, famous for bucking Go’s culture of humility. When Ke challenged Lee to a match, for example, he posted a video of himself as a boxer beating up Lee and ostentatiously bragged and baited his opponents.
In the aftermath of Ke’s defeat by DeepMind’s AI, however, he underwent a remarkable change. On TV appearances since then, he has affected a stance of irony, playfulness, and humility, becoming a much loved crowd-pleaser along the way. Again, looking for lessons, I can’t help but notice Ke’s extreme youth—15 years younger than Lee, 16 years younger than Fan—and wonder if he had less invested in a particular way of valuing and understanding himself. Perhaps he was therefore better able to change how he related to the world on a fundamental level.
Important to this story, too, is that, unlike Fan, whose pivot to temporary AI research consultant could be seen as a demotion from European Go champion, Ke’s pivot allowed him to remain at the top of the game.
The pivot from “best player in the world at humanity’s most logically complex game” to “comedian” is pretty dramatic, though, and I think the magnitude of that flip reflects the profundity of the changes coming down the pipe. And if Ke Jie has to do that, what does that mean for the rest of us?
…Even more heretical, players at much lower skill levels are beginning to overtake the old masters in popularity: The personable and attractive Botez sisters are the second-most-streamed chess players while having ELO ratings nowhere near the world’s best. And Zhan Ying, a Chinese Go player at a skill level considerably below Ke Jie’s, recently dethroned him, briefly, as the most-watched Go player in the world.
If this trend is any indication, we should expect to see softer skills—humor, presence, personality—become the game.