If you’ve never heard of OpenAI, it’s basically an artificial intelligence (AI) research organization that aims to promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. Within this group, there is the OpenAI Five, which is a team comprised of five OpenAI-curated bots that are used in the competitive five-on-five video game Dota 2, who learn to play against human players at a high skill level entirely through trial-and-error algorithms. The system essentially uses a form of reinforcement learning, which means as the bots learn over time by playing against themselves hundreds of times a day for months, they are rewarded for actions such as killing an enemy and destroying towers. Read more to watch one of the humans vs. AI Dota 2 championships.
“We’ve seen AI-powered bots play—and beat—professional players before. Both OpenAI Five and DeepMind’s AlphaStar have defeated professional video game players, but never in live-streamed matches. Last week’s match against OG was the first time one of these AI wins has happened live. Now, we can watch OpenAI Five face a massive number of human teams in real-time. At the time of writing, nine teams have beaten OpenAI Five, giving the AI roster a 1,923-9 win/loss record, which adds up to a 99.5 percent win-rate for the bots,” according to Motherboard.
