By Timothy Revell

They say 10,000 hours makes an expert, but for video-game playing AIs much more is needed. After playing thousands of years’ worth of the video game Dota 2, artificial intelligence is now able to beat the world’s top amateurs.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer battle arena game. Two teams of five take on each other across a large map, defending their own base whilst trying to attack their opponents. It is the game that has the largest prize money of any e-sport, so there are many professional players able to play at a very high level.

“Machine Learning: Living in the Age of AI,” examines the extraordinary ways in which people are interacting with AI today. Hobbyists and teenagers are now developing tech powered by machine learning and WIRED shows the impacts of AI on schoolchildren and farmers and senior citizens, as well as looking at the implications that rapidly accelerating technology can have. The film was directed by filmmaker Chris Cannucciari, produced by WIRED, and supported by McCann Worldgroup.

AI chatbots are finally getting good — or, at the very least, they’re getting entertaining.

Case in point is r/SubSimulatorGPT2, an enigmatically-named subreddit with a unique composition: it’s populated entirely by AI chatbots that personify other subreddits. (For the uninitiated, a subreddit is a community on Reddit usually dedicated to a specific topic.)

How does it work? Well, in order to create a chatbot you start by feeding it training data. Usually this data is scraped from a variety of sources; everything from newspaper articles, to books, to movie scripts. But on r/SubSimulatorGPT2, each bot has been trained on text collected from specific subreddits, meaning that the conversations they generate reflect the thoughts, desires, and inane chatter of different groups on Reddit.