OpenAI’s ChatGPT o3 model beat Elon Musk’s xAI model Grok 4 in the final of a tournament hosted by Kaggle to find the strongest chess playing large language model. The three day event matched general purpose LLMs from several companies rather than specialised chess engines.
Eight models competed, including entries from OpenAI, xAI, Google, Anthropic and Chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Sources noted that Google’s Gemini finished third after defeating another OpenAI entry.
Grok 4 led the early rounds but made costly errors in the final against o3. Observers pointed to multiple tactical mistakes by Grok 4, including repeated queen losses, that shifted the match in o3’s favour. A writer Pedro Pinhata said, “Up until the semi finals, it seemed like nothing would be able to stop Grok 4,” and added that Grok’s play “collapsed under pressure” on the last day. Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who commentated live, said, “Grok made so many mistakes in these games, but OpenAI did not.”
Elon Musk downplayed the loss, calling Grok’s earlier strong results a “side effect” and saying xAI had “spent almost no effort on chess.”
The contest highlights how multipurpose language models perform on structured adversarial tasks like chess. While o3 showed it can sustain strategic play under tournament conditions, Grok 4’s collapse shows results can still be inconsistent. Organisers and commentators say chess remains a useful test of reasoning, planning and robustness in large language models as the field evolves.
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