It’s not clear if artificial intelligence will take away all our jobs, but according to Elon Musk, it is going to take away our e-sports supremacy.
This afternoon, Musk tweeted that a bot built by his non-profit, OpenAI, beat several of the world’s best players at the video game, Dota 2.
OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017
In an accompanying blog post, OpenAI wrote that its bot had been undefeated over the last few days in Dota 1v1, a “complex game with hidden information [in which] agents must learn to plan, attack, trick, and deceive their opponents. The correlation between player skill and actions-per-minute is not strong, and in fact, our AI’s actions-per-minute are comparable to that of an average human player.”
What’s particularly impressive about the feat is that winning in Dota tasks players with building intuition about what their opponents will do, and building a corresponding game plan. “Our bot has learned—entirely via self-play—to predict where other players will move, to improvise in response to unfamiliar situations, and how to influence the other player’s allied units to help it succeed.”
The next step for OpenAI is to build a team of Dota bots that can both compete, and partner with, human players.
With AIs having won at chess and Go, and now an e-sport, perhaps another next step is for Musk to reframe his argument with Mark Zuckerberg–over whether or not AI is dangerous to us–toward whether it can win all the games.
You can rewatch the OpenAI bot’s beat-down of its Dota competition here.
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