They also claimed it "learned" to play by playing itself only however it was clear that most of the advanced techniques were borrowed from existing AI and by observing humans.
No surprise they gave up on that project completely and I doubt they'll ever engage in anything like that again.
Money better spent on different marketing platforms.
Saying you've solved Dota after stripping out nearly all of its complexity is like saying you've solved Chess, but on a version where the back row is all Bishops.
Look at how long Theranos went on! Miraculous product. Attractive young founder with all the right pedigree, credentials, and contacts, dressed in black trurtlenecks. Hell, she even talked like Steve Jobs! Investors never had a chance.
That is what investors see. You seem to treat this as a purity contest where you define purity
As an ex dota player, I don't think this is that far off from having full on, all heroes dota. Certainly not as far of as you are making it sound.
And dota is one of the most complex games, I expect for example that an AI would instantly solve CS since aim is such a large part of the game.
It is certainly possible, but i won't be impressed by anything "playing CS" that isn't running a vision model on a display and moving a mouse, because that is the game. The game is not abstractly reacting to enemy positions and relocating the cursor, it's looking at a screen, seeing where the baddy is and then using this interface (the mouse) to get the cursor there as quickly as possible.
It would be like letting an AI plot its position on the field and what action its taking during a football match and then saying "Look, The AI would have scored dozens of times in this simulation, it is the greatest soccer player in the world!" No, sorry, the game actually requires you to locomote, abstractly describing your position may be fun but it's not the game
But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. It's perfectly valid to judge the best an AI can do vs the best a human can do. It's not really fair to take away exactly what a computer is good at from an AI and then say: "Look but the AI is now worse". Else you would also have to do it the other way around. How well could a human play dota if it only had access to the bot API. I don't think they would do well at all.
And you can try to play some game where you create disadvantages to try to balance out all of the advantages of the machine interface, but again, hard to reason about the edge cases, and easy to create a misleading headline like "artificially limited reaction time worse than professional gamers" while in practice being able to react to information much more quickly than a human player because of its exclusive interface to game state. All of that is fair and well, and doesn't take anything away from the very cool achievements of google et al., but when you change the core mechanics of the game to accommodate a uniquely challenged player, you're playing a different game! Chess is ~mostly not about physically moving the pieces on the board, but Counter Strike is about little more than that! (And dota is somewhere in between.)
There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per synapse. (And more than 1kb is also not unreasonable.)
The whole point of the exercise is figuring out how much memory compares to a human brain.
I wouldn't have expected for anyone to even attempt to argue a human can beat, or even approach, a computer on working memory. Wikipedia is just 24.05gb. You are somehow claiming here that a human can hold that in working memory. That is they read it once and have perfect recall. Not even the most extreme savants have shown such feats.
We don't know what this means. Each neuron connects to thousands of synapses. I would assume that there is some quantity of information encoded in each pairwise connection of synapse-paths through a neuron. I would assume this is more than a bit, and also that it has something that might be described as a lossy fractal compression with each pathway adding or subtracting from whatever structures store information so that each path can use the same physical things - though not with perfect fidelity.
But the nuts and bolts are somewhat beside the point. The point is that if you look at Leela zero it only needs like 3GB of RAM to run and we have no evidence this is more memory than human grandmasters use to play chess. Yes, humans have imperfect recall but that's not relevant because neural net based chess engines do not work based on perfect recall.
Only the first time, later when it played better players it always lost. Players learned the faults of the AI after some time in game and the AI had very bad late game so they always won later.
As we're learning with LLMs, the dataset is what matters - and what's awesome is that you can see that in us, as well! I've read that our evolution is comparatively slow to the rate of knowledge accumulation in the information age - and that what this means is that you can essentially take a caveman, raise them in our modern environment and they'll be just as intelligent as the average human today.
But the core of our intelligence is logic/problem solving. We just have to solve higher order problems today, like figuring out how to make that chart in excel do the thing you want, but in days past it was figuring out how to keep the fire lit when it's raining. When you look at it, we've possessed the very core of that problem solving ability for quite a while now. I think that is the key to why we are human, and our close ancestors monkeys are...still just monkeys.
It's that problem solving ability that we need to figure out how to produce within ML models, then we'll be cooking with gas!