Greg Brockman, cofounder of nonprofit AI research organization OpenAI, had an interest in artificial intelligence from a young age, but he didn't come to it right away. Brockman studied computer science at Stanford before transferring to MIT, where he dropped out to launch online payments platform Stripe. As a founding engineer, Brockman helped scale the business from four people to 250. But he had his heart set on another field: artificial general intelligence, or systems that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. Brockman left Stripe to pursue a career in AI, building a knowledge base from the ground up.

Greg Brockman, cofounder of nonprofit AI research organization OpenAI, had an interest in artificial intelligence from a young age, but he didn't come to it right away. Brockman studied computer science at Stanford before transferring to MIT, where he dropped out to launch online payments platform Stripe. As a founding engineer, Brockman helped scale the business from four people to 250. But he had his heart set on another field: artificial general intelligence, or systems that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. Brockman left Stripe to pursue a career in AI, building a knowledge base from the ground up.

Elon Musk's research group, OpenAI, has created artificially intelligent bots that are capable of beating teams of five skilled humans in the video game, Dota 2. The bots were able to beat humans after learn the game over just four weeks. Described as a'milestone in computer science', the achievement means AI can work together to build long-term gaming strategies using'real-time and imperfect' data. Researchers hope that if they can can teach AI the skills they need to play video games, they can use bots to solve more real-world challenges, such as managing a city's transport infrastructure. The five-strong team of AI bots has now now set its sights on the Dota 2 world championship in August. The AI team will compete against seasoned professionals who battle for a prize fund of more than $15,500,000 (£11,000,000).

The achievement puts San Francisco-based OpenAI, whose backers include billionaire Elon Musk, ahead of other artificial-intelligence researchers in developing software that can master complex games combining fast, real-time action, longer-term strategy, imperfect information and team play. The ability to learn these kinds of video games at human or super-human levels is important for the advancement of AI because they more closely approximate the uncertainties and complexity of the real world than games such as chess, which IBM's software mastered in the late 1990s, or Go, which was conquered in 2016 with software created by DeepMind, the London-based AI company owned by Alphabet. Dota 2 is a multiplayer science-fiction fantasy video game created by Bellevue, Washington-based Valve Corp. Each team is assigned a base on opposing ends of a map that can only be learned through exploration. Each player controls a separate character with unique powers and weapons. Each team must battle to reach the opposing team's territory and destroy a structure called an Ancient.

Greg Brockman, cofounder of nonprofit AI research organization OpenAI, had an interest in artificial intelligence from a young age, but didn't come to it right away. Brockman studied computer science at Stanford before transferring to MIT, where he dropped out to launch online payments platform Stripe. As a founding engineer, Brockman helped scale the business from four people to 250. But he had his heart set on another field: artificial general intelligence, or systems that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. Brockman left Stripe to pursue a career in AI, building a knowledge base from the ground up.

Beating humans at board games is passé in the AI world. Now, top academics and tech companies want to challenge us at video games instead. Today, OpenAI, a research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, announced its latest milestone: a team of AI agents that can beat the top 1 percent of amateurs at popular battle arena game Dota 2. You may remember that OpenAI first strode into the world of Dota 2 last August, unveiling a system that could beat the top players at 1v1 matches. However, this game type greatly reduces the challenge of Dota 2. OpenAI has now upgraded its bots to play humans in 5v5 match-ups, which require more coordination and long-term planning. And while OpenAI has yet to challenge the game's very best players, it will do so later this year at The International, a Dota 2 tournament that's the biggest annual event on the e-sports calendar.

OpenAI's video-game-playing bots are getting much better at mastering sci-fi strategy war game Dota 2, seeing off semi pro players with ease in team matchups. However, they can't quite master the whole game to beat top professional teams – yet. Last August, machine-learning software built by the OpenAI lab headquartered in San Francisco managed to best Dendi, a pro Dota 2 player, winning two matches out of three. But the victories were only in one-on-one games – a single bot against a single human – and under very limited circumstances that are not applicable in real competitions. Fast forward about a year, and now OpenAI's bots can play in the more traditional five-versus-five settings, beating amateurs and semi-pro gamers.

The Dota 2 world championship, The Invitational, is fast approaching, and a top team will have a different-looking squad to contend with: a group of artificial intelligence bots. OpenAI, which Elon Musk co-founded, has been taking on top Dota 2 players with the bots since last year, and now it's gunning for a team of top professionals in an exhibition match at one of the biggest events in eSports. OpenAI took on individual players at last year's The Invitational in a one-on-one minigame, and pros said that by watching the matches back, they were able to learn from the bots. But playing as a team introduces different types of intricacies, and OpenAI had to teach the AI how to coordinate the five bots. At any time, a hero (or character) can make one of around 1,000 actions; the bots have to make effective decisions while processing around 20,000 values representing what's going on in the game at a given time.

Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to defeat amateur human teams at Dota 2. While today we play with restrictions, we aim to beat a team of top professionals at The International in August subject only to a limited set of heroes. We may not succeed: Dota 2 is one of the most popular and complex esports games in the world, with creative and motivated professionals who train year-round to earn part of Dota's annual $40M prize pool (the largest of any esports game). OpenAI Five plays 180 years worth of games against itself every day, learning via self-play. 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.