A new chapter in the tech rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk played out on the chessboard.
OpenAI’s o3 model crushed Musk’s Grok 4 in the Kaggle AI Exhibition Tournament with a clean 4-0 win.
Both AI systems had earlier beaten tough competition from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, and Moonshot AI.
The event was the first major chess face-off for general-purpose large language models since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022.
Old Allies, New Rivals
A decade ago, Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI together. Musk later left to create his own AI company, xAI, and the friendship soured.
Altman recently called Musk a “bully” after Musk’s failed attempt to buy OpenAI.
This chess match added a symbolic twist to their personal and corporate rivalry.
For Musk, Grok’s showing wasn’t the main goal. He posted on X: “xAI spent almost no effort on chess.”
The Rise of AI in Chess
Computers have outplayed humans at chess for decades. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue famously beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match.
Today, AI programs like Google’s DeepMind can teach themselves chess, Go, and other games at superhuman levels.
The Kaggle AI Exhibition marked a new frontier — testing how these modern large language models handle complex, strategic games.
A Tournament for the AI Age
Unlike specialised chess engines, these models were built to understand and generate human-like text.
Yet, OpenAI’s o3 proved it could also calculate, plan, and adapt like the best game-focused AIs.
The result has started talks about the hidden talents of LLMs. So, could mastery in games hint at broader problem-solving powers in real-world tasks?
What do you think — should AI tournaments focus more on games or real-world challenges?
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