Musk challenges legendary AI researcher Karpathy to an AI coding showdown against Grok 5 — gets a polite ‘no’ to an IBM Deep Blue-like showdown

Elon Musk has proposed a public coding contest between xAI’s Grok 5 and former OpenAI research lead Andrej Karpathy, comparing it to the 1997 showdown between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue. Karpathy declined, saying he’d rather collaborate with Grok than compete against it.

The challenge came in response to a clip from Karpathy’s recent interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he argued that AGI is likely still a decade away and described Grok 5 as trailing GPT-4 by several months.