The world’s greatest chess player of this generation, Magnus Carlsen, recently switched roles to do commentary instead of playing chess for an AI chess exhibition tournament on Google’s Kaggle Game Arena. Carlsen had some sharp words for the world’s leading general-purpose large language models (LLMs) such as xAI’s Grok 4, OpenAI’s o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google), Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google), o4-mini (OpenAI), Claude 4 Opus (Anthropic), DeepSeek R1 and Kimi k2 (Moonshot AI).
Carlsen was doing commentary for the Take Take Take app for the final of the AI chess exhibition tournament, where OpenAI’s o3 (backed by Sam Altman) humbled xAI’s Grok 4 (backed by Elon Musk).
Carlsen at one point said that watching the world’s top LLMs play was “like watching kids’ games”.
But what does Carlsen think about the men behind the world’s top AI movers-and-shakers?
For one, Carlsen revealed that he had played a couple of events with some of the world’s most influential men in the AI space.
“I have played in the same chess tournament as Sam Altman. It was an alternate moves tournament in Silicon Valley. It was around the Champions Chess Tour final in 2022. And I think Anish Giri was on the team with him. Sam wasn’t very good. So Giri was very unhappy about being teamed with him,” Carlsen laughed. “But he actually learned a lot through the experience. You could tell that he was very smart.”
Carlsen also spoke about playing in a tournament with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
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“He didn’t know much chess, but he was a little bit the same as Sam Altman. I thought he was even better. Was learning very, very quickly, he was forming his own opinions very quickly, which I thought was impressive. It’s a useful skill. They were not necessarily right, which you wouldn’t expect, but they were always well-reasoned,” Carlsen said.
Carlsen then spoke about Musk and spoke about the X owner’s disdain for chess, before explaining why he understands it to an extent.
“Elon I’ve seen in person but I haven’t talked to him. You know he famously doesn’t have the greatest respect for chess players or the game which, to some extent, I understand because it is not a very complicated game, right? It is very simple in many ways but I think that’s also the beauty of the game. Like it’s obviously simple since it took computers not that long to master it, right? Compared to some other games. But chess is also rich and very difficult to play as well. Like it’s simple enough to play that you can get joy from playing after practice. Like not maybe immediately but after practice practicing a bit but hard enough that you can never actually get particularly good at it as a human which we’ve found out by seeing engines play,” Carlsen said.
Carlsen shared a funny anecdote about playing chess with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind Technologies and an AI Adviser to the UK Government, who was recently awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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“I played an alternate moves event with Demis quite a few years ago at the London Chess Classic. It was a lot of fun. Demis is fantastic. I’ve met him many times, but in terms of chess, he’s kind of set in his ways: like he loves playing the Botvinnik System as white. And I asked him, ‘Do you know anything else?’ And he was like, ‘No, not really. That’s what I like to play.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, fine. That’s great.’ And we actually beat some really good players in that line. It’s a good system. But then it ended up where I think we had a tiebreaker in the finals. And as a tiebreak the two amateur players had to play each other, right? And then we discussed the game before and he said, ‘My opponent’s going to play 1.c4. What should I do?’ And I said, ‘What do you normally do?” Well, I play 1.c5, then I play g6 and so on. So I told him ways you could get around (the opponent’s tricks in the opening). And lo and behold, the game starts, he forgets everything, and he ends up in a horrible passive position. He fought really well but we lost,” Carlsen said before adding: “What he’s done for chess is fantastic, but also what he’s done for humanity with medicine is obviously even better.”
