Artificial Intelligence has already defeated the world’s best Chess and Go players, and now it has just followed up by beating the world’s top Dota 2 video game players as well.

The latest win for AI was notched up during Valve Corp.’s “The International 7,” a Dota 2 eSports tournament with a prize pool of over $24 million that saw the debut of a purpose-built AI bot from OpenAI.

OpenAI is a nonprofit AI startup co-founded by Tesla Inc. founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk in 2015. It aims to build and promote “friendly” AI that benefits humanity as a whole. Dota 2 is a popular multiplayer online battle arena video game in which two teams of five players compete to destroy a large structure defended by the opposing team known as the “Ancient” while also defending their own structure.

At last night’s event, OpenAI’s bot trounced one of the world’s top Dota 2 players, Danil “Dendi” Ishutin, in less than 10 minutes in the first round of action. It followed up with an even faster victory in the second round.

“This guy is scary,” said a shocked Dendi after the match. Elon Musk was just as impressed, tweeting about the significance of the win just minutes after the event.

OpenAI first ever to defeat world’s best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017

In a blog post, OpenAI later revealed that its machine learning AI bot had beaten two other leading human players earlier in the week. However, it should be noted that the game was adapted from its usual five-versus-five players to just one-on-one.

Still, that doesn’t take anything away from the achievement. Dota 2 is a strategic game that requires careful planning in order to win. Players need to trick their opponents and carry out surprise attacks in order to defeat enemy units. It also differs significantly from games such as Go, where players have access to the same information and are therefore on a level footing.

In the blog post, OpenAI’s team revealed that the bot was trained using a technique known as “self-play,” in which it began from scratch and learned by playing itself repeatedly over a two-week period. The bot’s performance improves over time as it adjusts to the game, Open AI said, learning how to predict its opponent’s movements and choose the most appropriate strategy to win.

The next step will see OpenAI create a team of Dota 2 bots that can either compete or collaborate with human players in full five-versus-five player matches. Here’s a video of OpenAI’s bot in action against Dendi last night:

Image: Valve