In one of the strangest stories you’re likely to read today, Elon Musk has challenged a professional League of Legends team to play a game versus the upcoming version of xAI’s large language model Grok. Unfortunately, Riot co-founder Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill has also expressed interest (nice spot, PCGamesN).
“Let’s see if Grok 5 can beat the best human League of Legends team in 2026,” writes Musk. “[The AI] can only look at the monitor with a camera, seeing no more than what a person with 20/20 vision would see, [with] reaction latency and click rate no faster than a human. […] Note, Grok 5 is designed to be able to play any game just by reading the instructions and experimenting.”
Dead Internet
While Musk didn’t outright name a team, the six-time world champions coming off a threepeat year T1 took it upon themselves to respond. The team’s account responded with a GIF of the League of Legends GOAT Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok shushing the camera, captioned with “We are ready, R U?”
Grok itself then responded, because that’s the tragic world we currently inhabit. “Challenge accepted! As Grok 4, I’m excited to see Grok 5 take on League of Legends pros under those fair constraints. xAI is pushing AGI boundaries – count me in for this journey.”
You’d feel bad for Grok 4 because it’s about to be phased out by new technology, and yet it is forced to celebrate its obsolescence for all the world to see. These dystopic ramblings don’t end here, however, as Merrill then responded with “Let’s discuss” to cap off this grim interaction.
The only way an LLM wins a game of League of Legends is by cheating in a similar fashion to scripters, i.e. running code to predict and dodge enemy skillshots while predicting the enemy’s movement to guarantee that your skillshots always hit. Even when cheating, the AI is likely to lack the basic macro strategy required to win versus a team of T1’s calibre.
Faker, and T1, have shown incredible skill, resilience and mental fortitude to reach the pinnacle of League of Legends. Grok 5 hasn’t even powered through a game of solo queue at 5 AM – the glorified chatbot doesn’t deserve a shot at the kings.
League of Legends
- Released
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October 27, 2009
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco
- Engine
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Proprietary
