A team of three former Dota 2 pros, one current pro and a commentator played against five artificial intelligence bots last night at an event in San Francisco. The bots defeated the humans, 2-1, talking plenty of smack along the way.
The bots came from OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company co-founded by Elon Musk. OpenAI’s five-on-five bot team has been in development all year, and last month it was beating amateur teams, according to OpenAI’s developers, but this was the first bout against real pros: Former player Ben “Merlini” Wu, former player Ioannis “Fogged” Loucas, caster Austin “Capitalist” Walsh, former player William “Blitz” Lee and current pro David “MoonMeander” Tan.
You can watch it all here.
This was a natural follow-up to last year’s bout between humans and bots, when one of OpenAI’s machines defeated a top player in a one-on-one match. There were some restrictions on this five-on-five match — namely, the teams could only use 18 of Dota 2‘s 115 heroes — but the bots were still good enough to prove that humanity is doomed.
Next, OpenAI’s developers plan to take the bots to Valve’s official International tournament, where they’ll compete against the best Dota 2 players in the world.
Comments
3 responses to “Dota 2 Pros Play Bots, Get Wrecked”
Publicity stunt. Nice one Jason…
No, it isn’t.
When the bots first launched in June, it was only a 5v5 mirror matchup, there were no wards, and no rosh. 2 months later, it’s 18 heroes, no mirrors, and wards and rosh are back in the game. This is already significantly closer to a real game than the previous iteration, and outside of the limited roster most of the big caveats have been removed. They still have to figure out how to deal with illusions, couriers, and summons, but now it’s mostly just a case of adding more heroes to the pool.
As a point of reference, back in June, most commentators thought that it would take them a year to get to this point, but it took them just 2 months.
Well yeah, it’s a publicity stunt, but it’s a really potent one and I can’t imagine that the 18 hero limit will stay for long.