MOUNTAIN VIEW, United States: OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has defeated Elon Musk’s Grok in the final round of a tournament held to determine the world’s top artificial intelligence (AI) chess player.
Hosted on Google’s Kaggle platform, the competition brought together leading general-purpose language models to test their reasoning and strategic thinking through a series of chess games. The tournament featured eight top-tier AI models, including Google’s Gemini, which secured third place.
While Grok was initially considered the favourite, its performance in the final was described as “unrecognisable” by experts. During his livestream, chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura remarked on Grok’s puzzling blunders, notably its repeated loss of the queen—errors that allowed OpenAI’s o3 to dominate with what he called “convincing wins.”
Chess has long served as a benchmark for AI development. As a rule-based, strategy-intensive game, it provides a clear framework to evaluate an AI’s ability to reason, plan, and execute complex tasks.
Historic milestones—such as IBM’s Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, and Google’s AlphaGo mastering the game of Go—have often marked major leaps in artificial intelligence.
Unlike traditional chess engines, the models in this competition were not trained specifically for the game. Instead, they are general-purpose AIs, designed to assist with a broad range of everyday tasks. Their ability to perform well in a cognitively demanding environment like chess offers valuable insight into their general reasoning capabilities and future potential.
The tournament result also adds another layer to the ongoing rivalry between OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Elon Musk, as their respective AI ventures continue to compete for leadership in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.
