OpenAI’s bots trounced humans 7,215 to 42 in Dota 2
Dota 2 players from around the world tried their best against OpenAI’s bot, but only a few surpassed its prowess.
Face it, we’re doomed if Skynet ever happens.
Over the last weekend, OpenAI’s Arena challenge saw artificial intelligence-powered bots beating humans consistently over the course of 7,257 games, with humans only managing to win just 42 games, a mere 0.6%.
To be fair, these were the same bots that hadcrushed TI8 winners OGin a 2-0 best-of-three sweep with wins decided in less than 40 minutes. Of course, when OpenAI first made its debut Dota 21v1 matchagainst Danil “Dendi” Ishutin back in 2017, everyone was pretty sure the writing was on the wall for humans.
The first human team to beat OpenAI’s system during Arena was Alpha Red, a professional Dota 2 team from Thailand, placing a 34-24 kill scoreboard over a 45 minute win. While there were allegations ofcheatingfrom the human players’ side, OpenAI’s system went on to maintain the 99% win rate throughout the weekend.
Only one team managed to achieve a 10-streak win, using a consistent strategy of split-pushing, where players would take one of the three lanes on the map and avoid team fights with the AI opponents. They would also cut creeps, preventing creeps from approaching their base, so that the AI would not be able to break through the backdoor protection (which makes buildings a lot tankier).
The 10-streak team also abused invisibility, which the AI had yet to properly figure out, to escape ganks and attack buildings before running away. The AI was also not reactive enough to understand that it had to protect its Ancient, allowing its human opponents, who bought items designed for building damage, to quickly destroy the Ancient once it was exposed.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, besides trouncing humans at Dota 2, OpenAI bots also partnered humans in a co-operative mode, playing a total of 34,466 games, which also shows the potential of human-AI partnerships.
Greg Brockman said ina tweetthat OpenAI’s algorithmic advances did have one drawback: “scripted components are a clear weakness that won’t change with training,” but then it was also “[…] just a handicap. There are still many aspects of the game, like invisibility, which are learnable.”
Avid Dota 2 players also discussed ways to exploit these perceived weaknesses throughRedditthreads and Discord servers, all dedicated to the efforts against OpenAI’s bot. The dev team behind OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot also opened aReddit AMAto address questions from curious players.
After their livestream was done, OpenAI’s Jonas Schneiderthanked everyonewho participated and said that their team hopes to be back with more in the future.
Thanks everyone for tuning into our livestream, we had a blast running it! Hope to be back with more in the future! The team is hoping to release further technical details about the OpenAI Five project soon.
