OpenAI's o3 dominates Grok 4 in AI chess showdown, winning 4-0 to claim tournament crown

OpenAI's o3 model emerged victorious in a high-profile AI chess tournament, defeating Elon Musk’s Grok 4 in a decisive 4–0 sweep. The event, hosted by Google’s Kaggle platform, served as a public showdown between two of the most prominent AI models in development, drawing attention to the growing rivalry between OpenAI and Musk’s xAI. The tournament, held from August 5 to August 7, featured eight leading large language models in a knockout format. Among them were OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini, xAI’s Grok 4, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus, DeepSeek’s DeepSeek R1, and Kimi’s k2. Grok 4 advanced to the final with strong performances, appearing to be the tournament’s top contender through the semifinals. OpenAI’s o3, however, proved unstoppable, defeating all opponents en route to the final. In the championship match, o3 dominated Grok 4 completely. According to Pedro Pinhata of Chess.com, who covered the event, Grok 4’s play was “unrecognizable,” marked by frequent blunders and poor decision-making. In contrast, o3 demonstrated sharp strategic reasoning and precision, winning all four games without significant resistance. Former world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, who livestreamed the final on YouTube’s “Take Take Take” channel, offered a scathing critique of Grok 4’s performance. He compared it to “that one guy in a club who has learnt theory and literally knows nothing else,” emphasizing that the model made fundamental errors repeatedly and lacked deeper understanding. The result adds another layer to the escalating public rivalry between Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, who leads xAI. The two have exchanged barbs over the past months, with Musk accusing OpenAI of being too aligned with Big Tech and Altman countering by highlighting Musk’s influence over X, formerly Twitter. Musk recently claimed in a post that a ChatGPT 5 Pro model rated him as more trustworthy than Altman. Earlier, Altman had prompted Grok to name a leader for the AI race, and Grok responded by suggesting Musk’s safety focus could be crucial—though it also acknowledged Altman’s role in making AI accessible. While OpenAI and xAI did not comment on the tournament, the outcome underscores the rapid progress in AI reasoning capabilities. Chess has long been a benchmark for machine intelligence, and the performance of o3 suggests it may be leading in complex, strategic reasoning tasks. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro secured third place by defeating o4-mini 3.5–0.5 in the third-place playoff. The results highlight not only technical advancements but also the growing stakes in the AI race, where performance in specialized tasks like chess can influence public perception and corporate strategy.