Kasparov on machine intelligence

by Frederic Friedel
8/24/2026 – In 1997, World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated 3½–2½ by Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer in New York. The loss in their second encounter marked the first time a machine beat a world champion in a standard tournament play. It was an historic moment that reshaped global perceptions of artificial intelligence. Almost three decades later, Kasparov has described his perception of AI and what he thinks about its future, in a Washington Post interview. Here are some excerpts.
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I was part of the Kasparov team and witnessed the traumatic loss first hand, and had numerous discussions with Garry on the subject of computer intelligence. Here are a few excerpts from the WP interview – with my comments in italics: 

The things we think of as hard — like computation and chess — turn out to be relatively easy for machines, while the things we consider easy — the stuff a toddler does effortlessly, like walking, recognizing a face or picking up an object — turn out to be extraordinarily difficult to automate.

As a science journalist, I had worked on the subject for years for a documentary the TV channel was planning – and made some daring predictions. Boy was I wrong!

Fifty years ago, a Cray supercomputer was one of the wonders of the world, yet the phones in our pockets are thousands of times faster. The scale of improvement in AI was impossible to conceive. Brute computing force is ruling the world of AI.

Indeed. In a recent article on our news page (How much faster are computers today?) I provided stunning details.

Machines are making progress, but the danger comes from humans — bad actors. Humans still have a monopoly on evil. The machine is an amplifier. It can amplify good, and it can amplify bad.

This is the subject of discussion that permeates the media today. Leading experts tell us that in just a few years we will have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), digital systems that can match or beat human thinking on any intellectual task. Not just chess, where they already play at a 3600 Elo level, but in any cognitive job humans can do.

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Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.
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