Elon Musk Takes on Sam Altman This Time Over the Chessboard

In the battle to see which artificial intelligence model is the best at chess, the final has come down to Elon Musk versus Sam Altman, two tech bosses who have repeatedly clashed over the future of AI.

The knock-out tournament organized by Google took place this week, with teams from the US and China pitting their large language models against each other. Along with Musk’s Grok 4 and Altman’s OpenAI, Deepseek, Google, Anthropic and Moonshot AI also put forward their models.

Despite the cerebral-sounding tournament, the level of chess is far from the heights reached by dedicated ...