We’re incredibly grateful to everyone in the Dota community for helping to create such a great training ground for AI progress: from motivating Valve to create and evolve the incredibly complex game, to supporting the analysts and professionals who can help us measure our progress, to the excitement we’ve seen from so many viewers which makes the project so much more fun to work on.

Five’s progress from extremely restricted Dota against low-ranked players in May to competing at Dota with the latest restriction set.

The purpose of the games were to showcase the capabilities of Five against the world’s best humans, playing games of “Real Dota”. Going into The International, we weren’t sure exactly who we would get to play, as it depended on the availability of people willing to play us on the mainstage. We were grateful to play against teams far stronger than the one at the Benchmark.

Five played its first match on Wednesday against paiN Gaming⁠(opens in a new window), one of the top 18 Dota 2 teams in the world and were eliminated from The International earlier on in the tournament. PaiN players have won an average of $350,000 in career tournament earnings. The match lasted around 51 minutes (games usually last 45 minutes) and after strong start for the humans, Five regained some ground in the mid-game, before succumbing to various high-level strategic pushes by human players. On Thursday, we played our second game against a team⁠(opens in a new window) of⁠(opens in a new window) Chinese⁠(opens in a new window) superstar⁠(opens in a new window) players⁠(opens in a new window), three of whom had played on a competitive team together. After some exciting back-and-forth teamfights, Five lost after 45 minutes. The average tournament earnings for each of these players were about $1 million.