However, a key ingredient of the LLM revolution is that for the first time very large models could be trained directly on raw, messy, real-world data, without the need for carefully curated and human-labeled data sets.

about systems that learn from data without being explicitly programmed, and about how exactly—and what exactly—we are trying to teach them.

It wasn’t necessarily its intelligence. It was the fact that the machine learned the game from scratch, with no coach, no human intervention, no lessons based on an expert’s past experience. The AI followed the fixed rules, not the millennia of accepted cultural norms attached to them.