"Faker, Come Face Me": Elon Musk Proposes AI vs. LoL Match... T1 Says "We Are Ready"

A Historic Showdown Since "Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo"
Musk Proposes LoL Esports Match on Social Media
T1 Responds: "We Are Ready"

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has expressed his desire for the AI model developed by his artificial intelligence company xAI to compete against the top professional team in League of Legends (LoL). On the 25th (local time), Musk posted on his social networking service (SNS), "I want to test whether Grok 5 can beat the best human LoL team in 2026." Grok 5 is xAI's next-generation AI model, which is reportedly scheduled for release in the first quarter of next year.

Musk explained that Grok 5 is "designed to be able to experiment with and play any game on its own, as long as it has the game manual." Unlike previous AI models that used algorithms optimized for specific games, Grok 5 is interpreted as having the ability to understand and play a variety of games. Musk also added that he would set several restrictions for the match between the AI and a human LoL team. He stated that Grok 5 would only be allowed to view the monitor screen, perceive information at the level of normal human vision (20/20, equivalent to 1.0 in Korea), and operate with human-level reaction delays and click speeds.

With Musk's challenge proposal, the eyes of LoL esports fans turned to T1. T1 recently achieved a historic third consecutive Worlds championship, becoming the first team in LoL esports history to do so. In particular, there is keen interest in how 'Faker' Lee Sanghyuk, considered the greatest player in LoL history, will perform against an AI opponent. In response to fans' expectations, T1 shared Musk's post on SNS and posted a video of Lee Sanghyuk's signature pose (the "shh" gesture with his index finger to his lips), declaring, "We are ready."

In the past, AI companies have promoted their technological prowess by competing against top human players in specific fields, while also identifying and addressing their limitations. A representative example is Google's 2016 Go match in Seoul, where its Go AI, AlphaGo, faced off against Lee Sedol, a 9-dan professional. Although AlphaGo overwhelmingly defeated Lee Sedol, the moment when Lee made an unexpected "divine move" that led to AlphaGo's defeat became a sensation. In 2019, before the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI achieved a complete victory over OG, the champion team of "The International (TI) 2018," a global Dota 2 tournament. At that time, OpenAI formed a five-member AI bot team called "OpenAI Five," which trained by playing the equivalent of 45,000 years of Dota 2 matches over 10 months. However, most of these AI models were specialized for specific games, and this is the first time a general-purpose AI model like Grok 5, which learns game understanding and strategic decision-making on its own, is participating.