I think the point here is that if you have to pretrain it for every specific task, it's not artificial general intelligence, by definition.

There isn't any general intelligence that isn't receiving pre-traning. People spend 14 to 18+ years in school to have any sort of career.

You don't have to pretrain it for every little thing but it should come as no surprise that a complex non-trivial game would require it.

Even if you explained all the rules of chess clearly to someone brand new to it, it will be a while and lots of practice before they internalize it.

And like I said, LLM pre-training is less like a machine reading text and more like Evolution. If you gave a corpus of chess rules, you're only training a model that knows how to converse about chess rules.

Do humans require less 'pre-training' ? Sure, but then again, that's on the back of millions of years of evolution. Modern NNs initialize random weights and have relatively very little inductive bias.