- OpenAI’s artificially-intelligent Dota 2 bots beat reigning The International 2018 Dota 2 champions OG in a match this weekend.
- The company’s bots learned Dota 2 by playing against themselves in tens of thousands of daily games with no human input.
- Artificial intelligence could lead to improved training tools and strategies for esports teams.
At the OpenAI Five Finals event in San Francisco this weekend, the company’s artificial intelligence platform defeated The International (TI) 2018 champions OG 
in a Dota 2 match.
OpenAI, a non-profit organization co-founded in 2015 by SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and Y Combinator chairman Sam Altman, trained its system to learn and compete in Valve’s 5v5 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game.
The OpenAI Five “team” trains by playing tens of thousands of simultaneous games against itself, as detailed on OpenAI’s website, amassing some 180 years’ worth of gameplay data each day. No human input is provided; the artificially intelligent bots must learn their own strategies to succeed at the game.
The International is the annual, de facto Dota 2 World Championship, and continually provides the largest prize pool in esports thanks to its crowdfunding component. OG won $11.2M USD by defeating PSG.LGD at last August’s grand finals and establishing itself as Dota 2’s top team. The total event prize pool topped $25.5M.
At The International 2017, Natus Vincere player Danil “Dendi” Ishutin lost a pair of 1v1 games against OpenAI. However, the full five-player OpenAI team lost two games against paiN Gaming at TI 2018. This weekend’s match against the reigning The International champions was a lopsided win, with the OpenAI Five taking back-to-back games.
Related Article: Esports Essentials: What is Dota 2’s The International?
Artificial intelligence could open the door to improved training tools and techniques for esports teams. Valve asked TI 2018 teams to practice against OpenAI’s bots last year, according to an August report by VPEsports.
Enterprise software technology company SAP has charted a similar path with its HANA platform, which uses machine learning to provide actionable data for players. SAP first partnered with Team Liquid’s Dota 2 team, and has since partnered with ESL and DreamHack, as well as PGL, to provide analytics and statistics for competitions.
In addition to the match against OG, OpenAI bots also teamed with a pair of broadcasters in a match with three bots and two humans on each side. The company also announced an OpenAI Five Arena program, in which Dota 2 players can compete online against or alongside the OpenAI bots starting this week.
