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Elon Musk’s team of robots learns at a super fast rate and trains by playing 180 years worth of games in a day

Team of AI bots will compete at Dota 2’s world championship in August

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The OpenAI Five, a team of bots, will be competing at “The International”, one of the biggest gaming competitions of the year. Photo: OpenAI

By Ethan Rakin

When top teams eventually compete at one of the biggest e-sports events of the year – Dota 2’s world championship “The International” – some of them will be facing a very different opposition than what they’re used to: a team of artificial intelligence (AI) bots.

The team of AI players are a product of OpenAI – a research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman – which announced that it aims to beat “a team of top professionals at The International in August”.

The team, which is made of five neural networks dubbed the “OpenAI Five”, actually plays about 180 years worth of games in a day to learn and improve.

OpenAI challenged individual players last year in an one-on-one mini game, and now it will be moving on to team-based games; which introduces a whole new set of challenges when trying to teach AI the little tricks and intricacies that these games tend to possess.

Dota 2 is a real-time complex strategy game played between two teams of five players, with each player controlling a character called a “hero”.

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