Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Bot Just Beat World's Best eSports Players - What's The Future Of AI ?
Artificial Intelligence has made incredible progress in the last few years, it almost seems like we're hearing about new AI innovations and use cases every other week.
As more and more technology includes AI, it becomes clear that we are approaching a new era: one where Artificial Intelligence will compete with human intelligence.
Entrepreneur and "real-life ironman" Elon Musk has always been very clear about the enormous potential of AI, and that it could even become a threat to humanity if it's not controlled in the right way.
That's why he has founded the nonprofit startup "OpenAI", that aims to turn AI into something positive and prevent its dangers.
This week, an AI bot from OpenAI managed to show off some incredible technological progress and gained a lot of media attention:
The Artificial Intelligence Bot managed to beat one of the world's best players in the highly competitive battle game Dota 2 in a 1-on-1 match.
The Tournament
The bot by OpenAI demonstrated its skills at the annual live tournament "The International" this past weekend.
It was up against a crowd favorite, the pro player "Dendi" who is one of the best in the world when it comes to Dota 2.
He was defeated by the bot twice, before forfeiting any more future matches.
After the game, Dendi stated that the bot “feels a little like [a] human, but a little like something else.” - many of its moves looked familiar and human.
He was surprised that it was possible for the AI machine to beat a human player - and therefore human intelligence.
'Bot is really fun and challenging to play against.
'I am sure it is possible to beat it. But it has no room for even slight mistakes.'
-Pro Player "Dendi"
AI Learning process
We've seen AI beat humans in games like Chess or Go before - but nothing as advanced as Dota 2.
So how do you teach a computer to play such a complex game like Dota 2?
The key is - you don't actually teach it.
Apparently, the game played against itself over and over for 2 weeks, until it had not only figured out the game, but also the best moves to win over his opponent. Beating a regular Dota 2 bot would only require 1 hour of learning.
The computer managed to learn certain tricks and tactics within the game, and although its actions per minute don't differ much from an average human, it can make the best possible decision within a split second - which makes all the difference.
"Our bot is trained entirely through self play. It starts out completely random with no knowledge of the world, and simply plays against a copy of itself, which means it always has an evenly matched opponent."-Greg Brockman, Co-founder and COO of OpenAI
Risks of Artificial Intelligence
The topic of Artificial Intelligence always also brings some criticism and ethical questions with it.
What if AI turns against us at some point, or overtakes us? How are you supposed to judge mistakes caused an AI, and how are you supposed to hold it accountable for it?
Elon Musk is very aware of this threat and has always voiced his concerns that AI should be regulated "before it's too late".
Two things come to my mind. Awesome & Scary
Its only a matter of time before AI blows up and becomes ubiquitous. Making dreams a reality is so exiting but kind of scary to think about.
In 20 or 25 years human will be robot or robot will lead the world.
If robot can have their own consciousness and some sort of common sense. Maybe.
@sirwinchester, I'm glad you included this quote. ""If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.". With all the alarm bells lately and media pile on, that quote resonated with me a lot.
Same here
I think it's interesting that various people working in AI have very different views on the potential pitfalls.
This article makes a great point: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/zuckerberg-and-musk-are-both-wrong-about-ai/
Musk has also been on about overpopulation recently too, which is a pretty flawed idea. See: https://overpopulationisamyth.com
I also think there is too much emphasis being put on what Elon thinks, if his views on overpopulation are not entirely accurate, what's to say his views on AI will be?
Wow, I didn't think we would be at that stage with AI. I guess the only way to beat is to pull out the USB stick lol.
Are we heading towards a real-life portrayal of i-robot where a guy like Will Smith will be all of humanity's savior? well.. too early to judge I reckon.. Having said that, I don't think beating the best Dota players should be a difficult task for a bot.. soon enough we will have bots for all e-games, not only games, all fields where machine language, NLU and AI is involved to whatever extent. And yes, once the bot becomes super intelligent in extracting the right "intents", "entities" and "actions", they could very well over-ride major logic files that could be a real threat to us.
WOW!! That's incredible!!!!
The future of AI is the future. It will be predominate eventually over everything.