OpenAI's Gabriel Petersson argues reaching the top 5% in League of Legends requires more skill than 95% of engineering jobs

if you are diamond at league of legends the only thing stopping you from building a billion dollar company is finding a problem you are so excited by that you never think about anything else

like the mechanics, map awareness, perfect execution at every step. all these things would have been extremely impressive if video games were something boring

but because the average dude will game for 20k hours these skills feel super uncool even if they're objectively hard

in addition to: 1. not needing immediate feedback loop for every action 2. acting in an unconstrained space without clear rules, and without having to pick your next action from a set list of actions

@gabriel1 You can get to top 5% just by being mechanically very good. You need game IQ for top 1%

@gabriel1 @nicole_clash

@gabriel1 What rank is top 5%?

@gabriel1 You’re right but you’re miscalculating pretty hard here. If you’re diamond in league with nothing built, you also likely don’t have anything you’re actually passionate about.

I’m diamond in league, like years ago. Before responsibility.

My useless friend is diamond too.

@gabriel1 not sure about this one. i had a chess phase where i entered the top 5% of chess players and around the same time I started there was a youtuber also starting who i thought was dumb as rocks. 1/4

@gabriel1 Peaked GM, well on our way to $1B at 🤸

@djcows @gabriel1 ofc you're a cass main

@gabriel1 voila he's played 10-15x more games than me. i tune into his stream again and am blown away by how good he got. surely he entered the top 1% of chess players.

so to me getting good at something is a function of time more than raw intelligence. (3/4)

@gabriel1 he would miss tactics left and right and couldnt grasp basic opening principles. in terms of raw intelligence i am positive we are 20 IQ points apart. lower bound. but life happens and i am working full time whereas he literally streams 24/7 and 2 years later.. (2/4)

@gabriel1 Surely D2+ right there are some chuds in D4 and below

@gabriel1 doubt, surely its a skill but a different kind of skill than engineering

@gabriel1 Well AI help the passionate people do more and AI is inherently conscientious

@gabriel1 league has open abstraction loops the gaming world has never seeen before or again

@scaling01 @gabriel1 When will this larp die

Diamond 4 is top 4% , for reference top 4% IQ is ~130. They’re obviously neither the same thing nor 1:1 correlated

“But 130 IQ is dumb as fuck compared to 170 IQ”

No shit?

“130 IQ is functionally closer to 60 IQ (iron) than 170 IQ”

????

@gabriel1 Top 5% is nothing lol. You’re still barely above noob tier at that point. Go be #1 at something. Everything else is just second rate.

And the skill gap for being a great engineer is much larger, although such skills will often overlap and be useful in both scenarios.

@gabriel1 top 5% is not that hard

it's actually quite terrible. the gap between low diamond to master, master to grandmaster, grandmaster to challenger, challenger to rank 1 is fucking gigantic

as low diamond player you are probably closer to iron players than master players