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by iotb 2879 days ago
> We do not know for sure in the case of OpenAI Five as there are too few public games to look at.

Thus the nature of a canned showcase demo. We do know they have a slew of restrictions. As an avid player, I know exactly why : because such combos require much deeper and true intellect to play efficiently. Even as such, given that I know i'd be up against an optimization algorithm, my strategy would be to create as much chaos and uncertainty as possible. Information theory is clear as to the impact this would have : It would be unstructured noise that would be hard to optimize and likely not seen before or significantly reflected in the AI's weighting system. This is the basis of adversarial attacks. I'm sure with a decent amount of games I'd be able to figure out a suitable one for 5 linked bots.

The perspective as to what's going on with this demo is much different if you actually play the game. I've actually seen a number of games like this bot exhibited. It's a strategy low skilled players engage in with the hope of overwhelming opponents with brute force. The character restrictions favor it. So its not by accident that this all converged into a demo that favors an unintelligent brute force optimization bot.

It favors something that can do range/hit point calculations quickly/accurately. Snowballing is required because there is no broader intelligence among the bots. When the bots snowball, it's essentially just one big optimization function. When they're stretched apart, the calculations are much harder.

Knowing what I know about the game and the fact that I'm up against a Weak AI bot with an optimized model, I'd know exactly how to screw it up with an adversarial attack. I'd train a team of people on that and show everyone exactly what human intelligence of capable of and why its superior. This happens in your average dota 2 match constantly.. Low skill players attempt brute force strategies just like these bots and you essentially wait them out and pick them apart. This isn't a new and amazing style of gameplay or something. There's already names for it.

When I used the term 'sloppy' I meant against the spirit and nature of the game and w/o consideration of the 'way in which one wins'... Ambushing towers at open 4v1 or 2 is some very hamfisted foolishness. Even in regular pub games with upper avg. players, there'd be a sharp punishment for such bro-tier gameplay. It usually results in an equally massive 'gank'. The way the human players responded in these pressure scenarios really has me questioning the whole event as I see avg. random players make far better decisions every day in dota.

That's just my unfavorable two cents. I'm not impressed because I understand how their bots are doing what they're doing, where the advantages lie, and I'm aware of what restrictions they placed on the game in favor of their bot.

Elon claims he's worried about a dark future with AI, it's actually solutions like this that are most scary because there is zero intelligence and a [by any means possible so long as you achieve the object] steering function. If you want to unleash chaos and destruction on the world and see a darker side to human intelligence you've never seen before, start releasing such 'weak AI' to manipulate people from the shadows. This is not strong AI or a path to it. It's more of the same Weak AI provided with exclusive and insane amounts of computer power/data and an objective to optimize for by any means necessary. In cases where it dominates, it's almost certainly a reliance on finding loopholes/flaws in a particular game not actual intelligence. You should see the danger in this right away.

Funny because OpenAI originally opened with the spoopy terminator like dangers of AI being so destructive we needed a group like them to save us... To now openly sharing such unintelligent and dangerous weak AI optimization platforms in the mainstream fear. Sort of like the 'Do no Evil' Mantra that was just slogan.

I think this is a great engineer accomplishment that no doubt taught them a lot. I don't see any broader 'safety' ideology underlying this... Just another great team of people trying to achieve AI like everybody else utilizing popularized approaches. It's better to just come out and say that. We can drop the 'Save the world from AI'/'Safety' superman talk and get to the brass tax of what they are doing and how, if at all, its different from what anyone else is doing in the space.

2 comments

> The perspective as to what's going on with this demo is much different if you actually play the game. It's a strategy low skilled players engage in with the hope of overwhelming opponents with brute force. The character restrictions favor it.

As a dota player who has been in the 99.5th percentile mmr at several occasions (right now at 98th) I disagree with this and a lot of the stuff you're trying to say. Dota is a strategy game, and the meta dictates what strategies are strong at a given point in time. The death ball strategy that the bots played is a result of that being the best strategy in the bot meta. So in contrast to what you said, it's not low skilled players that play these strategies, but rather high skilled players that play whatever strategy is popular in the meta (regardless of how 'intelligent' it is), in order to increase the chances of winning.

My impression is that when rich and powerful people talk about "the dangers of AI" what they really mean is "the dangers of AI (to me when it's not controlled by me)"
It is nothing new, or particularly bad. If we (good guys) will not have (insert powerful technology), then bad guys will have it and everyone will be worse off.