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I will never forget being at TI7 where OpenAI revealed an AI that could take on pro Dota players. Dota is an insanely complicated and difficult game. This was a

I will never forget being at TI7 where OpenAI revealed an AI that could take on pro Dota players. Dota is an insanely complicated and difficult game. This was an eye opening moment for me that led to a career shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five

jerrygenser 3y ago
Upvoted. Not sure why this got downvotes. It's very cool that you were at TI7 as I only watched this on youtube. I also thought this was an important moment.
- tantalor 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - leetharris 3y ago
    I could have left off the career switch anecdote, but I wanted to share this previous breakthrough and project with people who are not familiar. It was the foundation for technology like SIMA from Google.
    - shmageggy 3y ago
      The "foundation for technology like SIMA from Google" is more likely all of the other RL + games work that Deepmind did before and after that DOTA project.
  - jerrygenser 3y ago
    It seems like parent comment is the top comment on this post with a lot of replies and facilitated on topic discussion. Not sure which part of parent topic related another AI playing a game is off topic from the original post of an AI playing a game
jprete 3y ago
I know this might be perceived as an obvious question, but what exactly did you switch from, and to?
- qvrjuec 3y ago
  He was a professional gamer, and switched to biodynamic agriculture after seeing how little hope humanity had playing games against machines
  - WJW 3y ago
    Meh. People still do athletics competitions even though cars exist and can outpace any human. Weightlifting is also still a thing even though even an entry-level forklift beats any human weightlifter. Chess is more popular than ever before, even though nobody has any hope of beating a computer anymore. Out of all the fields that human do professionally, sports will be one of the last ones to disappear. The fact that it is (unaugmented) humans competing is the entire point.
    - tsumnia 3y ago
      > Out of all the fields that human do professionally, sports will be one of the last ones to disappear. The fact that it is (unaugmented) humans competing is the entire point. This is my thought/hope for what we'll expect in the coming years as AI's automation becomes more commonplace. Society's interests will start going towards activities that showcase human ability - sports, livestreaming (very much its own industry now, but mostly for socializing, art, and gaming), performance, dance, etc. Sure AI can 'do' these things, but not at the level elite performers can or with the subtle nuisances in human personalities.
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      I don't think the unaugmented qualifier is accurate. What matters is that there are well-established rules defining scope. People racing cars is still a very widely enjoyed form of entertainment.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
nsypteras 3y ago
So glad you said this! For some reason that's always stuck out to me as having been my biggest personal "wow" moment while watching AI development progress. ChatGPT is awesome but for some reason I've never felt as awed by it.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  I too was impressed at first, but got disillusioned after learning how they did it. It was much more similar to chess AI with piece-square tables than I first thought. https://gist.github.com/dfarhi/66ec9d760ae0c49a5c492c9fae93984a https://gist.github.com/dfarhi/66ec9d760ae0c49a5c492c9fae939...
  - aubanel 3y ago
    Did learning about the brain being made of meat also destroy your awe of human intelligence? I feel like being able to look inside the clockwork should not distract us from being amazed at how wonderful a system can be.
adtac 3y ago
If Dota was twice as complex, do you think an AI would be more than 2x better or less compared to your scenario? I suspect the more complex the game, the bigger the advantage over humans.
- jsheard 3y ago
  As I explained in my sibling comment the version of Dota they played was heavily simplified, because the full combinatorial explosion of mechanics was far too much for the AI training to overcome. They didn't even get close to playing normal Dota at a high level, nevermind a hypothetical version of Dota which is twice as complex.
- mminer237 3y ago
  A big advantage of AIs is instant reaction time. OpenAI programmed in an artificial reaction delay to most skills, but they were still generally much faster than any human would be. Overall strategy is where the AI was lacking, but its technical flawlessness makes up for it.
  - adtac 3y ago
    If we model the game as someone flicking switches, strategy is ability to know which switches to flick when whereas technical skill is the ability to quickly and precisely flick the chosen switches. In more complex games, there are more switches and the current set of best switches changes faster. With more switches, it's harder to know which are the best switches because the future is less predictable. And even if we figure out the best ones, they might change before we flick them. And even if we get around to it in time, we might fat finger it and accidentally flick an adjacent switch. And our opponent never gets tired or injured. This is why I suspect AIs have a much higher ceiling even if we limit them to half the APM pros have. Better strategy matters less, but I admit it's our only chance lol. FWIW, I've never played Dota but I've played a lot of AoE2 and from what I know they're similar enough (but maybe someone can correct me).
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  If you're talking immediate mechanical complexity, then yes. If you're talking delayed strategic complexity, then definitely not.
jsheard 3y ago
The caveat being that the scope of the game was significantly pared down for the sake of the AI. Specifically the team compositions were pre-determined, meaning the AI only had to understand 10 heroes in two specific arrangements of 5, when there's normally >100* heroes which can be chosen in any permutation, and certain game mechanics were also declared off-limits for the human players because the AI wasn't able to understand them. Beating pros in that subset of the game was an impressive achievement but there was a huge gulf between what they did and doing it in the full version of the game, which they quickly gave up on trying to do after collecting their marketing trophy of beating Dota pros in something resembling Dota. * I'm not sure exactly how many heroes there were at the time, it was less than the 124 there are today, but it was certainly a lot more than 10.
- avree 3y ago
  There were 112 heroes available at that time. It's also worth noting that two of the heros chosen for OpenAI to use, Viper and Sniper, are considered some of the mechanically 'easier' heroes, as they rely primarily on autoattacks to do damage, as oppose to decision-making around when to use spells. Crystal Maiden, Lich, and Necrophos, the other 3 of the 5 OpenAI heros, are similarly considered 'easier' as they have spammable, very forgiving abilities that can be used almost indiscriminately.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    baby steps. Still impressive. AlphaGo was strait up same. AlhaStar did have some limits placed to narrow it down for the AI. But was still imperfect information, and wildly complicated. And those were all 3+ years ago. Games are a lower resolution representation of the 'real' world. And we haven't seen any slowing down of AI scaling up for more and more complex world views. Eventually the 'map' will be the 'real', as real as the human brains internal map of reality.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      > And we haven't seen any slowing down of AI scaling up for more and more complex world views. We absolutely have. We have superhuman performance on Go, we have human expect level performance at Starcraft, and now we get human baby level performance at 3d games. The more complex the task/game the worse the AI gets relative humans it seems, I don't see how this shows the AI scaling up, to me this is all moving horizontally.
iamdelirium 3y ago
Not really. By only playing a certain subset of the game, the AI could use heroes that they were good at (micro intensive) while disallowing heroes that could counter the strategy the Open AI chose. Hardly a fair game.
- raincole 3y ago
  No? It's absolutely not what happened. Almost the opposite. The micro intensive heroes were NOT in the pool. AI literally chose Sniper and Sven. AI's APM was limited to a level lower than pro human players. If they had allowed micro heroes AI would have a big disadvantage. That was the most interesting part about the AI Dota game. AI isn't just better than humans at mechanical level. Even more surprisingly, AI (at least Open Five) isn't significantly better at last hitting than pro players.
pdimitar 3y ago
How did this change your career?
bitcharmer 3y ago
What is TI7?
- tsumnia 3y ago
  Dota's yearly competition, TI7 means "The International 2017"
  - pests 3y ago
    That's confusing.
    - jjcm 3y ago
      A better framing might be "the 7th iteration of 'The International', which happened in 2017"
injuly 3y ago
Oh, that was wild. Though to be fair, the human players had to rely on muscle memory to win lanes (CSing, blocking waves, pulling, trading hits, cutting waves, stacking, etc.); whereas the AI could perfect the timings down to the fraction of a millisecond.
- ballenf 3y ago
  Was there any control input limit on the AIs? Like if the AI couldn't click buttons or move the mouse faster than a very fast human. In a similar vein, it would be fascinating if the AI had to also evade bot detection, that is appear (nearly) indistinguishable from a human player.
  - kelvie 3y ago
    If I remember right there was a reaction time for the OpenAI team they could tweak, if I remember right it was around 200ms (and a short search I think confirms that).
    - Jensson 3y ago
      The bot did perfectly dodge a skill that humans almost never dodged because it didn't have a good visual cue. Against the AI that skill became useless, really screwed the humans over and made it clear to everyone that the AI didn't really play with the same limitations as humans. In the next game it played they had made it react even slower and then it no longer beat tournament teams.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - blharr 3y ago
    Somewhat related, AlphaStar has such a control input limit for Starcraft limiting the actions per minute by some amount.
garyiskidding 3y ago
Greg Brockman from OpenAI inserted the program drive for a game of Dota vs Dendi (popular Dota 2 player). Really memorable.
swolpatrol 3y ago
funny, I was there and got my only openAI shirt. I even competed againts the bot in the 1v1 and won. best memories from Seattle
12345hn6789 3y ago
I don't quite think it's that impressive. AIs in video games are specifically "nerfed" simply due to the fact they can make decisions much, much faster than humans. Open AI didn't do anything special in this case. See @deep blue for more. Or, any strategy game made in the last 20 years with AI difficulty mods.
- 7734128 3y ago
  AI in most strategic games are provided massive advantage over human players. In CIV V, for example, the AIs start with several units and techs on higher difficulties.
nurettin 3y ago
In short, the game was dumbed down and computer programs can micro perfectly, so the players had no edge.
quietthrow 3y ago
Can you share more about your career shift. What you did before and what you do now. And why the shift was triggered by closedAI 5?
voxl 3y ago
Did you forget the part where the bots simply lost twice against pro teams?

jerrygenser 3y ago

Upvoted. Not sure why this got downvotes. It's very cool that you were at TI7 as I only watched this on youtube. I also thought this was an important moment.

tantalor 3y ago
[flagged]
- leetharris 3y ago
  I could have left off the career switch anecdote, but I wanted to share this previous breakthrough and project with people who are not familiar. It was the foundation for technology like SIMA from Google.
  - shmageggy 3y ago
    The "foundation for technology like SIMA from Google" is more likely all of the other RL + games work that Deepmind did before and after that DOTA project.
- jerrygenser 3y ago
  It seems like parent comment is the top comment on this post with a lot of replies and facilitated on topic discussion. Not sure which part of parent topic related another AI playing a game is off topic from the original post of an AI playing a game

jprete 3y ago

I know this might be perceived as an obvious question, but what exactly did you switch from, and to?

qvrjuec 3y ago
He was a professional gamer, and switched to biodynamic agriculture after seeing how little hope humanity had playing games against machines
- WJW 3y ago
  Meh. People still do athletics competitions even though cars exist and can outpace any human. Weightlifting is also still a thing even though even an entry-level forklift beats any human weightlifter. Chess is more popular than ever before, even though nobody has any hope of beating a computer anymore. Out of all the fields that human do professionally, sports will be one of the last ones to disappear. The fact that it is (unaugmented) humans competing is the entire point.
  - tsumnia 3y ago
    > Out of all the fields that human do professionally, sports will be one of the last ones to disappear. The fact that it is (unaugmented) humans competing is the entire point. This is my thought/hope for what we'll expect in the coming years as AI's automation becomes more commonplace. Society's interests will start going towards activities that showcase human ability - sports, livestreaming (very much its own industry now, but mostly for socializing, art, and gaming), performance, dance, etc. Sure AI can 'do' these things, but not at the level elite performers can or with the subtle nuisances in human personalities.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    I don't think the unaugmented qualifier is accurate. What matters is that there are well-established rules defining scope. People racing cars is still a very widely enjoyed form of entertainment.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago

nsypteras 3y ago

So glad you said this! For some reason that's always stuck out to me as having been my biggest personal "wow" moment while watching AI development progress. ChatGPT is awesome but for some reason I've never felt as awed by it.

sanxiyn 3y ago
I too was impressed at first, but got disillusioned after learning how they did it. It was much more similar to chess AI with piece-square tables than I first thought. https://gist.github.com/dfarhi/66ec9d760ae0c49a5c492c9fae93984a https://gist.github.com/dfarhi/66ec9d760ae0c49a5c492c9fae939...
- aubanel 3y ago
  Did learning about the brain being made of meat also destroy your awe of human intelligence? I feel like being able to look inside the clockwork should not distract us from being amazed at how wonderful a system can be.

adtac 3y ago

If Dota was twice as complex, do you think an AI would be more than 2x better or less compared to your scenario? I suspect the more complex the game, the bigger the advantage over humans.

jsheard 3y ago
As I explained in my sibling comment the version of Dota they played was heavily simplified, because the full combinatorial explosion of mechanics was far too much for the AI training to overcome. They didn't even get close to playing normal Dota at a high level, nevermind a hypothetical version of Dota which is twice as complex.
mminer237 3y ago
A big advantage of AIs is instant reaction time. OpenAI programmed in an artificial reaction delay to most skills, but they were still generally much faster than any human would be. Overall strategy is where the AI was lacking, but its technical flawlessness makes up for it.
- adtac 3y ago
  If we model the game as someone flicking switches, strategy is ability to know which switches to flick when whereas technical skill is the ability to quickly and precisely flick the chosen switches. In more complex games, there are more switches and the current set of best switches changes faster. With more switches, it's harder to know which are the best switches because the future is less predictable. And even if we figure out the best ones, they might change before we flick them. And even if we get around to it in time, we might fat finger it and accidentally flick an adjacent switch. And our opponent never gets tired or injured. This is why I suspect AIs have a much higher ceiling even if we limit them to half the APM pros have. Better strategy matters less, but I admit it's our only chance lol. FWIW, I've never played Dota but I've played a lot of AoE2 and from what I know they're similar enough (but maybe someone can correct me).
CuriouslyC 3y ago
If you're talking immediate mechanical complexity, then yes. If you're talking delayed strategic complexity, then definitely not.

jsheard 3y ago

The caveat being that the scope of the game was significantly pared down for the sake of the AI. Specifically the team compositions were pre-determined, meaning the AI only had to understand 10 heroes in two specific arrangements of 5, when there's normally >100* heroes which can be chosen in any permutation, and certain game mechanics were also declared off-limits for the human players because the AI wasn't able to understand them. Beating pros in that subset of the game was an impressive achievement but there was a huge gulf between what they did and doing it in the full version of the game, which they quickly gave up on trying to do after collecting their marketing trophy of beating Dota pros in something resembling Dota. * I'm not sure exactly how many heroes there were at the time, it was less than the 124 there are today, but it was certainly a lot more than 10.

avree 3y ago
There were 112 heroes available at that time. It's also worth noting that two of the heros chosen for OpenAI to use, Viper and Sniper, are considered some of the mechanically 'easier' heroes, as they rely primarily on autoattacks to do damage, as oppose to decision-making around when to use spells. Crystal Maiden, Lich, and Necrophos, the other 3 of the 5 OpenAI heros, are similarly considered 'easier' as they have spammable, very forgiving abilities that can be used almost indiscriminately.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  baby steps. Still impressive. AlphaGo was strait up same. AlhaStar did have some limits placed to narrow it down for the AI. But was still imperfect information, and wildly complicated. And those were all 3+ years ago. Games are a lower resolution representation of the 'real' world. And we haven't seen any slowing down of AI scaling up for more and more complex world views. Eventually the 'map' will be the 'real', as real as the human brains internal map of reality.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    > And we haven't seen any slowing down of AI scaling up for more and more complex world views. We absolutely have. We have superhuman performance on Go, we have human expect level performance at Starcraft, and now we get human baby level performance at 3d games. The more complex the task/game the worse the AI gets relative humans it seems, I don't see how this shows the AI scaling up, to me this is all moving horizontally.

iamdelirium 3y ago

Not really. By only playing a certain subset of the game, the AI could use heroes that they were good at (micro intensive) while disallowing heroes that could counter the strategy the Open AI chose. Hardly a fair game.

raincole 3y ago
No? It's absolutely not what happened. Almost the opposite. The micro intensive heroes were NOT in the pool. AI literally chose Sniper and Sven. AI's APM was limited to a level lower than pro human players. If they had allowed micro heroes AI would have a big disadvantage. That was the most interesting part about the AI Dota game. AI isn't just better than humans at mechanical level. Even more surprisingly, AI (at least Open Five) isn't significantly better at last hitting than pro players.

pdimitar 3y ago

How did this change your career?

bitcharmer 3y ago

What is TI7?

tsumnia 3y ago
Dota's yearly competition, TI7 means "The International 2017"
- pests 3y ago
  That's confusing.
  - jjcm 3y ago
    A better framing might be "the 7th iteration of 'The International', which happened in 2017"

injuly 3y ago

Oh, that was wild. Though to be fair, the human players had to rely on muscle memory to win lanes (CSing, blocking waves, pulling, trading hits, cutting waves, stacking, etc.); whereas the AI could perfect the timings down to the fraction of a millisecond.

ballenf 3y ago
Was there any control input limit on the AIs? Like if the AI couldn't click buttons or move the mouse faster than a very fast human. In a similar vein, it would be fascinating if the AI had to also evade bot detection, that is appear (nearly) indistinguishable from a human player.
- kelvie 3y ago
  If I remember right there was a reaction time for the OpenAI team they could tweak, if I remember right it was around 200ms (and a short search I think confirms that).
  - Jensson 3y ago
    The bot did perfectly dodge a skill that humans almost never dodged because it didn't have a good visual cue. Against the AI that skill became useless, really screwed the humans over and made it clear to everyone that the AI didn't really play with the same limitations as humans. In the next game it played they had made it react even slower and then it no longer beat tournament teams.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blharr 3y ago
  Somewhat related, AlphaStar has such a control input limit for Starcraft limiting the actions per minute by some amount.

garyiskidding 3y ago

Greg Brockman from OpenAI inserted the program drive for a game of Dota vs Dendi (popular Dota 2 player). Really memorable.

swolpatrol 3y ago

funny, I was there and got my only openAI shirt. I even competed againts the bot in the 1v1 and won. best memories from Seattle

12345hn6789 3y ago

I don't quite think it's that impressive. AIs in video games are specifically "nerfed" simply due to the fact they can make decisions much, much faster than humans. Open AI didn't do anything special in this case. See @deep blue for more. Or, any strategy game made in the last 20 years with AI difficulty mods.

7734128 3y ago
AI in most strategic games are provided massive advantage over human players. In CIV V, for example, the AIs start with several units and techs on higher difficulties.

nurettin 3y ago

In short, the game was dumbed down and computer programs can micro perfectly, so the players had no edge.

quietthrow 3y ago

Can you share more about your career shift. What you did before and what you do now. And why the shift was triggered by closedAI 5?

voxl 3y ago

Did you forget the part where the bots simply lost twice against pro teams?