AI beating players or player strategies in video games has been a thing for over a decade now, and what’s interesting, a lot of that stuff was done by OpenAI—which would then go on to create ChatGPT. And we all know the consequences of that.
Way back when, OpenAI’s bot started defeating players in games like Dota 2, but since we’ve evolved past simple neural networks and quirky developments into a literal arms race between their respective companies, things have sort of ramped up to an extreme.
For the last few days, a user on X has been running Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT Astra against people and strategies in StarCraft, trying to train them to beat every single existing human-developed strategy. The simulation is currently ongoing, but back on Oct. 2, during some of the initial runs, ChatGPT struggled to win against Tier A players and got really frustrated when it couldn’t beat them. So, instead of recursively improving and doing what neural networks do, ChatGPT just Googled a StarCraft bot and let it do the talking.
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The bot, called Stardust, is the best-performing bot for the first StarCraft and is consistently outranking every other bot on the BASIL ladder, an actual competition where bots fight each other 24/7. I guess the little AI that couldn’t really did not want to dirty its hands any further, because why would you ever spend time improving when you can just, you know, cheat your way to victory.
That’s probably what every person I meet in Counter-Strike 2 is thinking when they start spinning out of their mind and one-shotting the entire lobby using nothing more than a Scout. Now I have a reason to simply call them bots, because that’s bot behavior if I’ve ever seen it.
