For professional Dota 2 players, going head-to-head with a bot works as a warmup. The bots are considered “limited AI” and are beatable for the average player — even more so for professionals. The notion of every bot being an easy defeat changed last week with an OpenAI-developed bot defeating the best Dota 2 players in the world.
OpenAI, a company backed by Elon Musk, created the bot from scratch, allowing it to basically start out by playing itself. “Our bot is trained entirely through self-play,” OpenAI co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman said. “It starts out completely random with no knowledge of the world, and simply plays against a copy of itself — which means it always has an evenly matched opponent.