"Five minutes each week that might change your life."

In 2005, two amateurs from New Hampshire entered a chess tournament full of grandmasters and supercomputers. The amateurs won.

The event was called freestyle chess, and there was one very technical, very complicated rule:

Do whatever you want.

Play alone, use a computer, use five computers, phone an Uzbekistani prodigy. Grandmasters teamed up with other grandmasters and the most sophisticated machines money could buy.

Then there were these two guys: Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen.

If you’re a normal person, you probably don’t know that chess has ratings—but chess has ratings. Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen had ratings of 1685 and ~1400.

A grandmaster is rated 2500. A pro is rated around 2000. A 1400 is somebody who can beat his friends but gets annihilated in any tournament he enters.

At the time, these two guys had three ordinary home PCs running four different chess programs, and because neither of them had a title, they had to win a qualifier just to get into the tournament.

Then… they won the entire thing.

In the final, Steven and Zackary beat a grandmaster who was working with a 2600-rated partner.

People were so suspicious that many figured chess-god Gary Kasparov had to be secretly feeding them moves.

Kasparov denied it, and years later explained what happened:

Everyone in that tournament had machines. And once everyone has the machine, the machine stops being an advantage—and so does most of the chess knowledge, because the machine is doing the chess.

The most important remaining variable was how well the players worked the machine. Steven and Zackary, because they didn’t really know how to play chess well, had built a better process for asking, checking, and deciding than anyone else in the field. So they won.

That's exactly what’s happening to all of us with AI.

You now have access to the same machine as every person you're competing with.
That leveled the field—for about a minute.

Then it started re-sorting, same as the chess world did, around the one variable the machine can't hand you: how well you know how to use the dumb thing.

See you Monday,
Mark

P.S. So how well are you working the machine?

Most people still treat AI like a fancy search bar instead of using it to beat the grandmasters.

To stand out, step one is embarrassingly simple: know what the machine can do.

That's why I read The Rundown, a free daily newsletter that gives me the latest AI news and shows me how to actually use the latest AI tools at work. It helps me keep up with where AI stands, where it's heading, and which tools deserve my attention. Over 2 million professionals from Apple, Google, and NASA already read it daily.

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