One might tend to chuckle at the news that a ‘chess Olympiad’ was recently held, not between human players, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) entities. Yet, the developments in the sphere of automatons, which are becoming as smart as human beings if not yet smarter, are no laughing matter, posing as they do risks for human civilisation.
It has now become a standard practice for technology companies to use chess to assess the progress and abilities of a computer. Already, modern chess machines are proving to be unbeatable against even the top human players. However, the latest competition did not involve computers designed especially for chess games, but between AI programs designed for everyday use.
No less than eight models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, as well as Chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, battled against each other during the three-day tournament. The ‘champion’ turned out to be OpenAI’s o3 model, which defeated xAI’s model Grok 4 in the final. Google’s model Gemini claimed third place in the tournament, after beating a different OpenAI model.
The AI chess tournament took place on Google-owned platform Kaggle, which allows data scientists to evaluate their systems through competitions. While Sam Altman’s OpenAI model claimed the top spot, Grok’s developer Elon Musk shrugged off the defeat as not disproving his AI model was the smartest!
Slowly, but surely, humanity is waking up to the imminent dangers posed by AI, which, apart from facilitating violation of privacy, is capable of interfering with the global democracy scenario through spread of misinformation, or causing market volatility, automation-spurred job losses, as also cataclysmic abilities to induce weapons automatisation! The biggest concern is the possibility of ‘thinking’ machines being actually developed in real life, and the threat of humankind being outsmarted by machines. In this context, it may be recalled that around a year back, Musk had attacked third-place winner Google’s AI model Gemini by claiming that it was sexist, thereby pointing to alleged biases within that AI system.
Musk’s charge has serious implications, considering that Gemini plays a crucial role in various Google products, including YouTube. Indeed, if Gemini’s narrative is controlled by a particular ideological perspective, it could lead to a distortion of truth and the censorship of diverse perspectives! Because the tech giant Google is a key player in the communication world and wields a significant influence in shaping public perceptions, the potential consequences of its using biased AI can well be imagined!
The Gemini example illustrates the reality that it is no longer merely a question of job losses or stolen identities, for AI has the ability to empower giant tech corporations in an unimaginably devastating way, and enable them to control societal thinking and way of life.