OpenAI is burgeoning neural network artificial intelligence that is becoming more and more capable of tackling complex problems. It works by teaching and learning from, itself, by playing itself at games. Its most recent favorite is DotA 2 and to show off how far it's come, developers had it play some of the best DotA 2 players in the world. Amazingly, it won quite handidly.
OpenAI Five is the latest iteration of the AI and it's made up of five neural networks, each as complicated as an ant brain. Despite that diminutive complexity, it was able to tackle the much larger, more general-purpose brains of its human opponents. Not only was it able to tackle them in one on one engagements, using tactical positioning and ability usage to get kills, but strategically it was able to work around them and gank, retreat to draw the humans out of position, and even sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the team.
Just watch it in action against some top players over the past weekend:
Watch OpenAI Five Benchmark from OpenAI on www.twitch.tv
The only time the human players even had a chance, was when the AI team was severely hampered by poor champion choice.
If you'd like to see how it does what it does and see a break down of specific skills it possesses, OpenAI researchers explain it all in this video:
Although it takes an enormous amount of hardware to run these kinds of AI systems -- it takes hundreds of GPUs and CPUs for them to learn at speed -- they are getting smarter all the time. In the future, there won't be any games an AI can't beat us at.
However, that should make human players better in turn and mean they can start to teach us all sorts of things to improve efficiency in areas outside of gaming.
