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Dota 2 pro players win match against Elon Musk’s AI bots

Although the humans won, the bots made more kills in the game.

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
mobadota2initialgameplay2.jpg

MOBA game Dota 2.

Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET

OpenAI Five, a video-game playing artificial intelligence bot, has fallen to humans again.

The International, an esports championship for video game Dota 2, hosted a match Wednesday with Brazilian pro team Pain against OpenAI Five The intense game lasted roughly 52 minutes, and the humans won.

OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company co-founded by Elon Musk . Its game-playing software beat human pro players in single-player matches at the International last year and beat amateur players in teams in June. Earlier this month, OpenAI Five tallied a loss against semi-pro players.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by Valve. It's free to play and has over 10 million active users a month. Each team has five heroes that can regenerate at a base. Whichever team first destroys the other's base wins.

"What we proved on Wednesday is we're right there at the edge of human ability, and the test is whether we can beat a pro team," Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, said in an emailed statement. "The test for us is whether we can play at a high enough level to win against a professional team this week."

Although the humans secured a solid win, the AI bots had more kills -- meaning the bots killed human heroes more frequently. The bots learn based on data and past mistakes, they try to solve the same problem over and over again until they get it right.

"OpenAI Five plays 180 years' worth of games against itself every day," OpenAI noted in a blog post in June.

The bots team will play against two more pro teams on Thursday and Friday. Here's how to watch the International from home.

Valve and team Pain didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.