AI will face off against pro Dota 2 players at The International

AI is getting smarter and smarter, including computers that can beat humans in competitions like chess, and now another step is being taken by OpenAI Five, a team of five neural networks who has just announced that they'll be using their technology to try and beat some of the top professionals in the world of Dota 2.

The AI has already started to defeat amateur human teams, and where better to test this at a professional level than at The International in August, although to do this there'll only be a limited set of heroes. The team doesn't expect necessarily to succeed, but they'll host a match versus top players on July 28, and the point is to keep developing and teaching this AI.

"OpenAI Five plays 180 years worth of games against itself every day, learning via self-play," the post explains. "It trains using a scaled-up version of Proximal Policy Optimization running on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores — a larger-scale version of the system we built to play the much-simpler solo variant of the game last year. Using a separate LSTM for each hero and no human data, it learns recognizable strategies. This indicates that reinforcement learning can yield long-term planning with large but achievable scale — without fundamental advances, contrary to our own expectations upon starting the project."

For more details, check out OpenAI Five's post in full, but do you think AI can beat a top Dota 2 team?