Elon Musk claims AI will solve chess in 3 years: Chess.com hits back with 10^44 positions, Vietnamese netizens get a shout-out

A media war between Elon Musk and Chess.com erupted on social media platform X on March 22, 2026, when the tech billionaire declared that chess would soon be fully solved by AI. The response from Chess.com's official account came almost too quickly: "Elon, do you know how many legal chess positions there are? About 10^44. That's more than the number of interns you've ever hired." Earlier, Musk had posted on X that "chess is about to be solved, in about 3 years, thanks to compressed computation. Then there will be nothing left to calculate." The statement, full of the science-fiction style of the Tesla, SpaceX and xAI CEO, touched one of the oldest debates in the chess world: can this intellectual game be completely conquered by AI? Chess.com did not stop at an astronomical figure. It also playfully recalled that Musk once called social media operators "interns", and replied: "We have interns too, and we even have Vietnamese interns. They say 10^44 is a number that even your supercomputers cannot handle." The reference to Vietnamese interns made the Vietnamese chess community share the exchange widely, creating a viral wave of jokes among fans. This is not a simple online squabble. Since 2026, when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, humanity has known that machines can beat the best chess players. By 2026, DeepMind's AlphaZero had gone further, learning within hours and defeating Stockfish, then the strongest chess engine. No human has ever challenged an engine since. But the idea of "fully solving" chess is very different from merely building a machine that plays better than a human. Mathematicians define a solved game as one where, from any position, the optimal result is known when both sides play perfectly. Checkers and Connect Four have been solved or almost solved over the decades. For chess, estimates put the number of legal positions at roughly 10^44 and the number of possible games at a mind-boggling 10^120. This is larger than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe, which is about 10^80. That is why Chess.com stressed: "Even if Musk could compress information in ways beyond imagination, 10^120 remains a logical barrier." Pure mathematics shows that naively proving a solution to chess would require computing power and memory exceeding everything available. The strongest machines today, even future quantum computers, would need to process cosmic-scale complexity. Still, Musk's statement is not entirely empty. He mentioned "compressed computation", a research direction that xAI is exploring, aiming to find hidden patterns that could simplify complex problems. In theory, if an AI discovered new structure in the space of chess positions, it could choose perfect moves without performing 10^120 calculations. But that is only a hypothesis. Science requires evidence, while the billionaire's claim sounds more like marketing. The story became even more ironic when observers recalled that in 2026, a chess tournament for AI was held involving two major models: xAI's Grok 4 and OpenAI's o3. The result was not favorable for Musk. Grok 4 lost to o3, proving once again that building a strong chess engine is not easy even for prestigious AI labs. Analysts view Musk's remark not as a scientific forecast but as a communication strategy. When a tech mogul talks about "solving chess", he is really stressing the immense power of artificial intelligence. This is familiar messaging from xAI, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and many other companies. In that context, Musk's extremism is a way of drawing attention to his own brand. But the strategy misses something important: the global chess community is not afraid of AI superiority. After AlphaZero, online chess participation and viewership actually increased. Top players like Magnus Carlsen, or reigning world champion Gukesh, still draw huge audiences, not because they can beat AI, but because they produce games full of mistakes, emotions and human resilience. If AI truly solved chess in three years, would people stop loving the game? History says no. On the contrary, AI makes human chess more precious. Notably, before the 2026 statement, Musk had made similar comments about chess. In 2026, he said that "chess is too simple for real life, because it has no fog of war, no technology tree, no asymmetric starting positions and no probability." In 2026, he was even said to have asked for a chess event at Tesla headquarters to be stopped. These details reveal a long-held dismissive attitude toward chess, and the "chess will be solved" statement is just the latest form of that attitude. Interestingly, Chess.com chose not to reply with dry theory. Instead, it used humor and, more importantly, a shout-out to "Vietnamese interns", turning the story into something that resonated far beyond the technology bubble. The incident is similar to previous Chess.com antics, from witty replies to players' complaints to hilarious videos about chess variants. For a platform competing fiercely with open-source rivals like Lichess, acting as the "guardian" of chess reputation before technology claims is a powerful marketing move. The real lesson lies in how we think about AI's limits. The fact that an AI plays better than humans does not diminish chess; saying that chess will be solved does not make players abandon their passion. The appeal of the 64 squares is not about finding the perfect move, but about the duel between two human minds—people who can get tired, whose hands can shake, and who can blunder right on the edge of victory. AI can suggest a better move, but it cannot replace the moment when a player looks at their opponent and thinks: "Do you really dare to play that move?" The question now is not "will AI solve chess?" but "when AI becomes unbeatable, why would we still play chess together?". Perhaps the answer lies with the Vietnamese chess community just referenced by Chess.com. They do not play because they fear AI will defeat them; they play because they can laugh together, argue together, and share the thrill of winning a tense game. Whether or not chess is solved, the joy of those people will always remain an irreplaceable part of the game. While Musk may continue to make bold predictions about the future of AI, Chess.com has shown another way to respond: prove it with numbers, celebrate the community and cherish our love for the game. If an AI ever truly solves chess, that may be a sad day for science, but it will remind us that the beauty of chess does not lie in mystery—it lies in people.