International Master Levy Rozman gathered some unlikely opponents for a chess exhibition this week: artificial intelligence chatbots that, despite their prowess at conversation and writing complex computer code, still haven’t figured out how chess pieces should move.
The tournament streamed on Rozman’s GothamChess channel, pitted professional chess engine Stockfish against seven generative AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Elon Musk’s Grok from X.
The results were exactly what you’d expect when language models try to play chess: a mix of decent opening moves followed by increasingly chaotic attempts to bend the game’s laws.
The match was most interesting for the light it shed on pure AI—that is, models trained at specific tasks based on predefined rules)—versus generative AI, or models trained to generate new content based on previous information.
First Match: Snapchat vs. Stockfish
The 2025 Chatbot Chess Championship opened with a clash between Stockfish, the disciplined chess prodigy, and Snapchat AI, the generative, stock AI platform that the Snapchat social net…
