According to multiple reports over the past week, Facebook recently shut down its AI-fueled chatbots after they created a secret language for communicating--a language that was not of human origin. This is part of the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) project designed to create bots that can "negotiate" with other bots and humans. While this sounds freakishly ominous, Facebook is far from alone in this debate. Google's DeepMind recently experienced a similar event when it spawned a new shorthand language, and a number of research labs (including Elon Musk's OpenAI) are currently working on similar negotiation systems, considered a key step in the development of AI. Why did this particular announcement gain traction?

Garry Kasparov and DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis discuss Garry's new book "Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins ", his chess match with IBM Deep Blue and his thoughts on the future of AI in the world of chess. Event moderated by Demis Hassabis, CEO, DeepMind of Google. In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was a watershed moment in the history of technology: machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect. It wasn't a coincidence that Kasparov became the symbol of man's fight against the machines.

You might not have noticed, but over the weekend a little coup took place. On Friday night, in front of a crowd of thousands, an AI bot beat a professional human player at Dota 2 -- one of the world's most popular video games. The human champ, the affable Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, threw in the towel after being killed three times, saying he couldn't beat the unstoppable bot. "It feels a little bit like human," said Dendi. The bot's patron was none other than tech billionaire Elon Musk, who helped found and fund the institution that designed it, OpenAI.

Today we played Dendi on mainstage at The International, winning a best-of-three match. Over the past week, our bot was undefeated against many top professionals including SumaiL (top 1v1 player in the world) and Arteezy (top overall player in the world). Dota 1v1 is a complex game with hidden information. Agents must learn to plan, attack, trick, and deceive their opponents. The correlation between player skill and actions-per-minute is not strong, and in fact, our AI's actions-per-minute are comparable to that of an average human player.

Elon Musk is a hype merchant, and this weekend his Twitter account served up a generous serving of hoopla for the OpenAI bots that were destroying the best Dota 2 players in the world. As a veteran Dota player and inveterate contrarian, I couldn't let Musk's exaggeration go by unchallenged. What we saw the OpenAI bots achieve was awe-inspiring for anyone who's ever dabbled in Dota, but it's still only scratching the surface of the competitive complexity of this game. OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.

At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes, this goes wrong. Sitting inside OpenAI's San Francisco offices on a recent afternoon, the researcher Dario Amodei showed off an autonomous system that taught itself to play Coast Runners, an old boat-racing video game. The winner is the boat with the most points that also crosses the finish line. The result was surprising: The boat was far too interested in the little green widgets that popped up on the screen. Catching these widgets meant scoring points.

Some of the most revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence are coming from the world of video games. The OpenAI team, supported by tech maven Elon Musk, showcased an AI bot at a tournament in Seattle that decisively beat several of the world's best Dota 2 players in one-on-one matches. The stunning upset over pro gamer and crowd favorite Danylo "Dendi" Isutin was broadcast live from the stage at The International, a $24 million Dota 2 tournament backed by Valve. In the first match, the machine-learning algorithm defeated Dendi in ten minutes. Dendi then resigned from the second match, and declined a third.

At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes, this goes wrong. Sitting inside OpenAI's San Francisco offices on a recent afternoon, the researcher Dario Amodei showed off an autonomous system that taught itself to play Coast Runners, an old boat-racing video game. The winner is the boat with the most points that also crosses the finish line. The result was surprising: The boat was far too interested in the little green widgets that popped up on the screen.

This is a collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard to develop StarCraft II into a rich environment for RL research. PySC2 provides an interface for RL agents to interact with StarCraft 2, getting observations and sending actions. We have published an accompanying blogpost and paper, which outlines our motivation for using StarCraft II for DeepRL research, and some initial research results using the environment. Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product. You can reach us at pysc2@deepmind.com.

Last night, OpenAI's Dota 2 bot beat the world's most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting. The bot beat Danil "Dendi" Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world's top Dota 2 players. Elon Musk's OpenAI trained the bot by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end. "We've coached it to learn just from playing against itself," said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki. "So we didn't hard-code in any strategy, we didn't have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it's just pro level."