Bill Gates Celebrates “Huge Milestone” as Elon Musk Project Builds AI Bots that Can Defeat human Teams in Dota 2
A nonprofit OpenAI research company, backed by the billionaire Elon Musk, has built a team of robots that can beat a team of humans on Dota 2 and Microsoft’s Bill Gates is a huge fan.
The idea of artificial intelligence might be a worrying one for anyone that has watched too many Terminator films, but research and development of the technology shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
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The list of things that various AI tools can do is growing on a daily basis and news about robots, or teams of robots, outperforming humans at various tasks seems to be becoming a regular occurance.
However, AI is still lagging behind human ability in some of life’s more complex tasks, especially when teamwork and real-time problem solving and learning is required.
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That’s why everyone is so impressed by the news of a team of AI robots defeating a team of humans at one of the most complex MOBA games on earth, Dota 2.
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, is one of those people and on June 27th he took to Twitter to state that the win was a “big deal” because “their victory required teamwork and collaboration” which, in his words, is a “huge milestone”.
#AI bots just beat humans at the video game Dota 2. That’s a big deal, because their victory required teamwork and collaboration – a huge milestone in advancing artificial intelligence. https://t.co/UqIUhh9xFc
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) June 26, 2018
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This is just one of many amazing projects I had a chance to see at @OpenAI, where they’re working to ensure as many people benefit from AI as possible. This is an incredibly important mission, and I’m excited to see more of their work.
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) June 26, 2018
Dota 2 is one of the most popular MOBA games on the planet and the world’s best players compete for millions of dollars every year.
AI bots have previously beaten some of those top players in one versus one matches but this is the first time that a team of bots has managed to defeat a team of humans.
Christy Dennison, an Open AI machine learning engineer, has explained that the bots are currently playing against ameteur teams but the plan is to beat the best pro teams by the end of the year:
“This year, we want to beat the best pro teams at the full game. To do this, we have built a new AI system which we spent the last few months training […]
[…] We are now starting to play against amateur teams to test our skill and to our surprise, so far, we have won our first games against every team we have tested”.
The AI bots actually learn Dota by playing themselves and the “OpenAI Five” team is apparently able to play around 180 years of games every single day.
With practice hours like that, it sounds like even the world’s best teams will struggle to stay ahead of the AI movement for much longer.
More information on the OpenAI Five can be found in the video below.
