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Now AI is beating us at our favorite video games

"A huge milestone in advancing AI," Bill Gates tweeted after an AI system took on a human team in Dota 2.

Marrian Zhou Staff Reporter
Marrian Zhou is a Beijing-born Californian living in New York City. She joined CNET as a staff reporter upon graduation from Columbia Journalism School. When Marrian is not reporting, she is probably binge watching, playing saxophone or eating hot pot.
Marrian Zhou
2 min read
Bill Gates

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates congratulated OpenAI's team bots for beating human players at the video game Dota 2 on Monday.

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Bots now can work in teams and beat humans at video games .

Bill Gates tweeted on Tuesday that artificial intelligence bots working in a team had beaten human players at the esports video game Dota 2. He praised the victory as "a huge milestone in advancing artificial intelligence." Business Insider spotted the tweet.

The AI bot team was developed by OpenAI, a nonprofit AI research company co-founded by Elon Musk. Open AI employed five neural networks, collectively known as OpenAI Five, which defeated amateur human teams at Dota 2, according to the company's blog post published on Monday.

This is just the latest instance where AI has shown its dominance over human. We saw computers beat humans at chess in 1997, beat humans at Jeopardy in 2011 and vanquish the world's best human players of the ancient game of Go in 2017. Earlier this month, an IBM computer out-argued a human in a debate. 

"OpenAI Five plays 180 years worth of games against itself every day, learning via self-play," the company wrote. It also aims to beat a team of top professional gamers at The International -- Dota 2's international championship -- coming up in August.

OpenAI created a bot for Dota 2 and had taken down top gamers as a single player at The International last year, according to IGN. It will enter the multiplayer 5v5 matches with OpenAI Five this summer.

"Our team is focused on making our August goal," said Jack Clark, a spokesman for OpenAI, in an email statement. "We don't know if it will be achievable, but we believe that with hard work, and some luck, we have a real shot."

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