A team of AI players capable of playing Dota 2 at an advanced level that was developed by AI research company OpenAI will be challenging The International 2018 (TI8) champions OG in order to showcase how much AI technology has advanced.

OpenAI’s team of AI players, called the OpenAI Five, notably defeated amateur and semi-pro Dota teams last year in preparation for challenging the top teams during the TI8 main event in August last year. While OpenAI Five ended up losing to both paiN Gaming and a team of Chinese pubstars, the research company remained confident in the progression of its AI players.

OpenAI will be looking to show how much the OpenAI Five has improved since last year in a live showmatch against TI8 champions OG on April 13.

According to a blog post by OpenAI, the showmatch will demonstrate what the company believes “how humans and AI will interact in the future.”

“We believe that AI’s impact on the world will be driven by its competence, scalability, and ability to enhance what humans can do — and this event will use OpenAI Five to concretely demonstrate each of these. We hope [it] will help people better internalize AI progress and how it will affect the world,” said OpenAI.

The showmatch against OG will have the same rules as the OpenAI Five’s matches in TI8, which differs them from actual Dota games by giving each player an invulnerable courier instead of one mortal courier for the entire team, for example.

It will be interesting to see how OpenAI Five will fare against a team like OG. The team of AI players notably started off strong in its showmatches in TI8, but would always falter against the advanced late-game strategies of professional teams. Such a weakness would be fully exploited OG, which notably took the championship at TI8 off the back of multiple comeback victories against more heavily-favored opponents — including a thrilling 3-2 Grand Finals triumph against Chinese juggernauts PSG.LGD.

“Video games are awesome, and Dota is the best, and now we will get to play against the most advanced AI developed for this incredibly complex game.
If the machine’s purpose is to win then we have something in common, we will be doing what we do best and settle our internal arguments about how potent a machine can be at Dota,” said OG captain Johan “Notail” Sundstein in a statement. 

According to OpenAI, Dota 2 has been a good testbed for developing its general-purpose AI technologies.

“It has additionally turned out to be a great avenue for helping people experience modern AI — which we expect to become a high-stakes part of people’s lives in the future, starting with systems like self-driving cars,” the research company added.

OpenAI Five’s showmatch against OG will be will be hosted in the Bay Area live and will also be broadcasted on the company’s Twitch channel.