It might as well have been the latest grudge match of the tech industry.
On one side: The reasoning-tuned of OpenAI o3 model. Flagship AI model, Grok 4 of Elon Musk on the other.
The two met in a final that put their skills, as well as the reputations of their makers to the test in an AI chess tournament hosted by Kaggle of Google.
o3 swept the board 4–0 and took the AI chess crown.
The third-place playoff went to Gemini 2.5 Pro of Google, which defeated o4-mini 3.5–0.5.
Tech companies have long used chess to measure the progress and capabilities of a computer. Even for the best human players, today’s specialist engines are virtually unbeatable.
AlphaGo is a program developed by DeepMind of Google to play the Chinese strategy game Go. In 2016, it made headlines when it defeated world champion Lee Sedol.
However, this competition pitted general-purpose AI programs against each other to see which model would come out on top over the chessboard.
OpenAI, xAI, as well as Kaggle did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
From August 5 to August 7, the tournament ran in a knockout format featuring eight large language models: o3 of OpenAI and o4-mini, Grok 4 of xAI, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash of Google, Claude 4 Opus of Anthropic, DeepSeek R1 of DeepSeek, and k2 of Kimi.
Cruising through its bracket to reach the final, Grok 4 impressed early. Dismantling every opponent along the way, o3 did the same.
It wasn’t close when the two met in the last match.
A writer for Chess.com, which provided coverage for the tournament, Pedro Pinhata, wrote that up until the Semifinals, it seemd like nothing would be able to stop Grok 4 on its way to winning the event.
