Elon Musk does not have 'greatest respect for chess players', says Magnus Carlsen

Magnus Carlsen recently said that tech billionaire Elon Musk “famously doesn’t have the greatest respect for chess players”. Speaking during commentary for an AI chess exhibition tournament on Google’s Kaggle Game Arena, Carlsen said “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”. “It is very simple in many ways but I think that’s also the beauty of the game,” he added.


Carlsen noted that computers mastered chess relatively quickly compared to other games, but the game still has depth and difficulty for humans. “It’s obviously simple since it took computers not that long to master it…compared to some other games,” he said, stating that “It’s simple enough to play that you can get joy from playing after practice.


“But after practicing a bit hard…you actually get particularly good at it as a human which we’ve found out by seeing engines play,” he continued.


In 2024, Musk reacted to Carlsen’s disqualification from participating in the World Rapid Chess. He then shared a post on X, saying “Magnus is based”.


OpenAI beats Elon Musk's Grok 4 in AI chess


According to a BBC report, OpenAI’s o3 model recently defeated AI's model Grok 4 in the final of a AI chess tournament .


As part of the Kaggle's three day tournament, eight large language models (LLMs) including those from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI along with chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, battled against each other.


Pedro Pinhata, a writer for Chess.com, said “Up until the semi finals, it seemed like nothing would be able to stop Grok 4 on its way to winning the event”. “"Despite a few moments of weakness, X's AI seemed to be by far the strongest chess player... But the illusion fell through on the last day of the tournament," he added.


Carlsen said that Grok’s moves were “chess-related moves” but they were made at “the wrong time and in weird sequences.” He described some of Grok’s moves as similar to those who “like that one guy in a club tournament who has learnt theory and literally knows nothing else.”


Commenting on OpenAI’s o3 model’s performance, he said:


“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.”