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After Deep Mind beat Go (and before), there was a lot of Starcraft being "the next thing" for AI. That's why a lot of research institutions (including Deep Mind and Facebook) are working on that.

In fact, it was always a bit suspicious that Open AI chose to work on a different game, which may or may not be as hard. Having multiple groups working on the same problem makes it easier to understand the progress made.

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I suspect Dota 2 is a lot easier than Starcraft. I watched a video of that AI, and it was mostly tactical optimizations ("micro" in Starcraft-speak). The AI would position its unit just right, aim perfectly, optimize for maximum damage. The stuff machines are best at.

Dota 2 is tactical, so having perfect micro is enough to win at least simple matches. Starcraft 2 is a different story.

Slow humans is not as much a bottleneck in Dota as it is in Starcraft. It's easier to "brute force" Starcraft by sheer APM, which is easy for AI to do.

Nobody would find that interesting though. Just like the Dota not, and Deep Mind's Quake bot, accuracy and APM would of course be capped to human levels.

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