On August 11, 2017, it was announced that OpenAI beat the world’s top professionals at 1v1 matches of Dota 2 tournament under standard rules. The bot’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) learned the game from scratch through self-play. This is a feat of achievement for AI as Elon Musk states this is “vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.” Shortly after it was announced that the AI bot won the tournament, Elon Musk also tweeted out his appreciation and thanks to Microsoft for using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform and it’s “massive processing power” to win the tournament. This is a really great example of how the massive computing power of Microsoft Azure can be used, in addition to yet another stepping stone in the path towards much more advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Would like to express our appreciation to Microsoft for use of their Azure cloud computing platform. This required massive processing power.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017

This win for AI come nearly a year after OpenAI, the research organization co-founded by Elon Musk, publicly chose to use the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Azure Compute is used to run the AI workloads from OpenAI. These types of highly intensive compute workloads can achieve much greater levels of scale at a cheaper cost using Cloud services than generally possible in a more “traditional” on-premises data center. This AI win is a great example of the capabilities of cloud computing like that found in Microsoft Azure.

The following video shows the match in action:

This perhaps gives us all a glimpse into the world of AI that Elon Musk keeps warning us against.

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.