Elon Musk backs xAI’s Grok 5 to defeat top League of Legends players by 2026

Elon Musk wants to use Grok 5 to beat a top human League of Legends team in 2026, and he is asking developers to join xAI’s gaming platform to improve its artificial general intelligence (AGI) capabilities to play games.

The xAI and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has pitted xAI’s upcoming AI model Grok 5 against some of the world’s best professional League of Legends players, looking for a match sometime in 2026. 

Musk announced the competition on the social platform X on Tuesday, asking developers to join xAI’s gaming studio to improve the new model’s prowess in video games.

“Let’s see if Grok 5 can beat the best human team League Of Legends in 2026 with these important constraints: Can only look at the monitor with a camera, seeing no more than what a person with 20/20 vision would see. Reaction latency and click rate no faster than humans,” he wrote on X.

Elon Musk ‘ambitious’ with Grok 5 gaming aspirations

Grok 5’s release was initially meant for this year, but Elon Musk announced in mid-November it was delayed to early 2026. According to chatter from sources closer to xAI, the upcoming iteration has 60 trillion parameters and supports multimodal capabilities to process both visual and textual information. 

xAI estimates there is a 10% chance that Grok 5 could achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), surpassing previous AI benchmarks of its prior versions. In 2019, its competition, OpenAI group of Five became the first AI to defeat world champions in an esports tourney, besting the Dota 2 team OG in back-to-back games at The International Finals. 

OpenAI Five had been training nonstop since June 2018, adapting to model updates, game patches, and new features. Over ten months, it consumed 800 petaflop/s-days of processing power, experiencing 45,000 years of Dota self-play on about 250 years of simulated experience per day.

Musk said Grok 5 will be able to learn games by reading instructions and experimenting, rather than relying on specialized pre-programmed strategies. Cryptopolitan reported about xAI’s gaming ambitions in October, when its CEO stated that his startup plans to release a “great AI-generated game before the end of next year.” 

Gaming community says Grok 5 can’t win

Members of the gaming community believe it is not possible for the new AI model to defeat a group of top League of Legends players by 2026. 

“You wouldn’t even be able to beat an LCS team, much less Faker and the boys. League has far too many variables/interaction & game knowledge context / legit team coordination required to win at the highest level,” said Twitch streamer Voyboy. 

Another user countered his statement, citing OpenAI’s victory over “arguably the best Dota 2 team of all time at the internationals.” 

“OpenAI created a new meta comparable to move37 in terms of creativity. Granted, it wasn’t a transformer model, but Grok 5 might not be a full transformer either,” they propounded.

Voyboy replied to the sentiment, saying Musk’s restrictions on visual input and reaction speed limit the conditions and advantages OpenAI had in Dota 2’s matches. 

“Didn’t OpenAI have API access and no APM restrictions, etc? The rules Elon is setting here to match the human pro players make it a completely different equation,” he surmised.

Is AI in video games welcomed? 

Earlier this month, Junghun Lee, CEO of Nexon, stated that every game company is now using AI, a sentence that caused a stir among indie developers and the gaming community. 

In an interview with The Verge, Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou, co-founder of Röki and Mythwrecked developer Polygon Treehouse, said: “It’s just not true. The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork […] are unfair.”

Despite the controversy, some executives like the CEO of interactive video game company Genvid and former Square Enix director Jacob Novak believe gamers “generally do not care.” 

“I should add that in-game art and voices are merely the tip of the spear. Many studios I know are using AI generation in the concept phase, and many more are using Claude AI for code.” 

Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has been mauled by criticism for including AI-generated artwork from Studio Ghibli. Yet, Novak noted that gamers should expect “a lot more slop coming their way.” 

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