The International In the past hour, OpenAI's artificially intelligent bots lost their first match against professional players at smash-hit computer game Dota 2 at The International – the video game's annual championship tournament. It's the first bout in a best-of-three competition between human professional players versus OpenAI's code, the other two rounds will take place over the next two days, each day a different human team. Thousands of hardcore Dota fans lit up by glowing bracelets sat down at the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, Canada, to watch pros battle against a machine running OpenAI's software in this first round. The humans – dubbed Team paiN – were five players from Brazil, while OpenAI Five is made up five long-short-term memory neural-network-based agents. Dota 2 is a popular battle strategy game played online.

OpenAI made headlines last year when it proved a bot could beat a professional gamer head to head at one of the world's most complex video games. But it had one more gaming goal to conquer -- to beat a professional team of five. Now, after proving the bot can beat teams that rank in the top 1 percent of amateur players for its game of choice, OpenAI will get its chance to shine at the International, one of the world's most established video game tournaments. The tournament is where the researchers hope to showcase how far Elon Musk-backed OpenAI has come in terms of its ability to control its five-character team as well as any team of five humans can. While machines have beaten humans at games -- from IBM computer Deep Blue's chess victory in 1997 to a Google bot's win over Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016 -- each game has offered a new challenge for artificial intelligence to solve.

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).

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.

Can we learn something from the AI playing against Arteezy? I also give a conclusion about what the bot is going to be doing in the future and how OpenAI will try to achieve this.

Last week was the high point of the Dota 2 competitive year: it was the week of The International, Valve's biggest tournament. On Saturday, Team Liquid walked away with more than $10 million after defeating Newbee 3-0 in the grand final. Right now, one of the requirements to be a good Dota 2 player is that you've got to be a living, breathing human. The game does include some basic computer-controlled bots to practice against, but any seasoned player of the game should have no trouble prevailing over these bots, even on their hardest "Unfair" difficulty (though the Unfair Viper bot is a legendary jerk that's utterly miserable to play against). Last Friday, however, we got a hint of a new, altogether more threatening kind of computer-controlled player: an AI-controlled bot built by Elon Musk's OpenAI.

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.