2024 World Chess Championship: Google Sponsorship and Innovative AI Integrations

The 2024 FIDE World Chess Championship, sponsored by Google, has commenced in Singapore and will run from November 25 to December 15. This prestigious event pits reigning champion Ding Liren against challenger Gukesh D in a highly anticipated match.

Google’s involvement in the championship goes beyond mere sponsorship. The tech giant is introducing several innovative AI-driven experiences to enhance the chess community’s engagement. One of these initiatives is the “Beyond the Board” digital exhibition, launched in collaboration with the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and Google Arts & Culture. This exhibition delves into the history of chess from the sixth century to the present, highlighting key figures and the impact of AI on the game.

Another exciting development is GenChess, an AI-powered experiment from Google Labs that allows users to create unique chess sets based on text prompts. Using Google’s advanced image generation model, Imagen 3, users can reimagine traditional chess pieces in innovative ways.

The FIDE & Google Efficient Chess AI Challenge, hosted on Kaggle, invites participants worldwide to build their own AI chess engines under strict memory and processing limitations. This challenge aims to foster creativity and innovation in AI development, with Kaggle providing free computational resources and support.

In December, Google will also introduce “Chess Champ” within the Gemini app, allowing users to play chess against a language model. Additionally, the “Chatting Chess” segment on the FIDE livestream will use Gemini to provide insightful commentary and chess trivia during the championship matches.

The championship itself will feature live commentary from experts like David Howell and Jovanka Houska, and fans can follow every move on FIDE’s YouTube livestream starting at 5:00 PM Singapore time.