AI, Horses, and Chess Masters: Got It?
January 23, 2026
Andy Jones writes a lot about AI on his blog of the same name. He took a break from AI to discuss, “Horses.” Andy decided to write about horses, because he investigated the amount of horses in the United States pre-engines. There were tons of horses in the US pre-1930, but then between 1930-1950, 90% of all the horses in the country disappeared.
Where did they go? Let’s not think about that. The fact to takeaway from this is that over the 120 years when the engine was in development, horses didn’t notice.
Andy then writes about chess and grandmasters. A similar decline happened between the capabilities of computers winning chess games over grandmasters:
"Folks started tracking computer chess in 1985. And for the next 40 years, computer chess would improve by 50 Elo per year. That meant in 2000, a human grandmaster could expect to win 90% of their games against a computer. But ten years later, the same human grandmaster would lose 90% of their games against a computer. Progress in chess was steady. Equivalence to humans was sudden.”
Alex returns to discussing AI with another similar comparison except on a quicker scale. He mentions that he was a senior researcher at Anthropic and spent a lot of his time answering questions. Anthropic implemented Claude, its chatbot, and Alex’s job answering questions went down. Claude now answers 30,000 questions a month. It only took six months for Claude to outpace Alex when it took decades for horses and grandmasters years to be made obsolete.
Whoa, Andy or is it “woe, Andy”?
Whitney Grace, January 23, 2026
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
