Starting from Tuesday, a unique chess tournament might offer the answer to the question on everyone’s mind: which is the smartest artificial intelligence (AI) model. The chess tournament, to be played over three days on Kaggle Game Arena, in partnership with Google DeepMind.
The tournament will also have world no 2 chess player Hikaru Nakamura doing livestreams of the action on his Twitch channel with his insights while world no 1 Magnus Carlsen will do an event-ending recap for the Take Take Take app.
Popular chess streamer Levy Rozman (known popularly as Gotham Chess) will also be doing daily recaps and analysis videos on his YouTube channel.
The event will feature eight of the world’s leading AI models: Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google), Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google),
o3 (OpenAI), o4-mini (OpenAI), Claude 4 Opus (Anthropic), Grok 4 (xAI), DeepSeek R1 and Kimi k2 (Moonshot AI).
Elon Musk, who is the man behind Grok, was slammed by chess players last year for his opinion about chess. “Computers are so much better than humans at chess, it’s absurd. I predict that chess will be essentially fully solved (like checkers) within 10 years,” he had posted on X in May last year.
He had also spoken in an interview about playing chess for his school chess team. “I was on the school chess team. But I find that chess is a simple game frankly. I mean you only have 64 squares. I was pretty good at chess as a kid. I won every game.”
Responding to Musk’s comments about never losing at chess and it being a simple sport, Nakamura had said: “Anybody who says they had never lost at chess, you know something (fishy) is going on!
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Back in the 90s machine vs human and machine vs machine chess tournaments (such as the Top Chess Engine Championship or Chess.com Computer Chess Championship) used to be quote popular. But after the machines grew too strong, the events ran out of steam and were discontinued.
The event will be help with help from popular streaming platform Chess.com and Google DeepMind, which gave the world the chess-playing computer program AlphaZero in 2017. AlphaZero is a neural network that became really strong in the sport by playing millions of games against itself for four hours. In fact, AlphaZero was able to outperform Stockfish 8, which was back then one of the strongest chess programs, just four hours after being fed the rules of chess and being told to learn by playing simulations against itself.
When AlphaZero and Stockfish played a 100-game match, AlphaZero won or drew all of the games.
