OpenAI’s Deprecated o3 Model Defeats Elon Musk’s Grok 4 in AI Chess Exhibition

Sam Altman's OpenAI o3 model, recently deprecated in favor of GPT-5, dominated Elon Musk's Grok 4 in a four-game sweep during Google's Kaggle Game Arena AI Chess Exhibition. The matchup, held August 5-7, pitted general-purpose chatbots against each other in untrained chess play—no engines, no MOVE databases, just internet-absorbed knowledge.

World champion Magnus Carlsen dismissed both AIs as playing like "a talented kid who doesn't know how the pieces move," estimating their performance at roughly 800 ELO. The bots vacillated between flashes of competence and bewildering blunders, revealing the limitations of language models in strategic gameplay. Carlsen's commentary underscored the gulf between human mastery (his own rating: 2839 ELO) and AI's current chess capabilities.