News
Elon Musk’s OpenAI to battle in Dota 2 World Championship video game tournament
OpenAI, a research lab co-founded by Elon Musk, has developed a new breed of AI agents that are capable of playing Dota 2, a complex strategy game, in 5-on-5 multiplayer matches. OpenAI’s new bots have so far been able to beat amateur and semi-professional teams. With this accomplished, the research lab is now looking to bring its bots to The International, a prolific Dota 2 tournament, this coming August.
The new bots go by the name of OpenAI Five, a reference to the number of neural networks working together in the team. To train the neural networks, the AI has been playing roughly 180 years worth of gameplay every day using reinforcement learning. This enables the AI to learn the intricacies of the game, considering that it is far more complicated than board games like Chess and Go. Dota 2, for example, involves hiding data from players, preventing the system from perceiving the entire playing field at a given time.
The hardware employed by the research lab to train OpenAI Five is impressive. The five neural networks train through a scaled-up version of Proximal Policy Optimization running on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores. The same setup was adopted in a much smaller scale last year when OpenAI rolled out an artificial intelligence system that proved capable of beating the best Dota 2 players in the world in 1-on-1 matches.
Currently, however, OpenAI Five can only play the game with several restrictions. For one, the AI system can only use five of the 115 heroes available in the game. Skills such as Invisibility, Summons, and the placement of wards are also disabled. The research lab, however, hopes that through time, the neural networks would be able to play the game without any restrictions at all.
As could be seen in a recent video shared by the research lab, OpenAI Five is actually being received well by the Dota 2 community. Professional Dota 2 player Blitz, for one, noted that the bots are adopting strategies that are incredibly effective. In a match against OpenAI Five, Blitz, together with four employees of the research lab, put up a fight before getting dominated by the articificial intelligence. In a statement after the game, Blitz sheepishly stated that the bots capitalized on every small error he made during the match.
“I think the team fight aspect of the bot(s) was excellent. It didn’t mess up. When it came to coordination, it was some of the best pure team fighting because it felt like I was getting hammered every single time I made a mistake. I feel like normal humans don’t do that,” the professional Dota 2 player said.
So what’s the secret behind OpenAI Five? In a statement to The Verge, OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman noted that unlike human players, the bots have “no ego” when they play the game. The teamwork aspect of the bots was also trained by allowing them to work individually at first, then encouraging them to work together.
“The bots are totally willing to sacrifice a lane or abandon a hero for the greater good. For fun, we had a human drop in to replace one of the bots. We hadn’t trained them to do anything special, but he said he just felt so well-supported. Anything he wanted, the bots got him,” Brockman said.
Ultimately, Brockman is encouraged by OpenAI Five’s development so far. The research, after all, is motivated by the idea that if AI systems can be trained to perform complex tasks such as learning a game as intricate as Dota 2, it could eventually be used to solve equally complex real-world challenges. Some examples of real-world applications could be designing and managing a city’s transport structure, or the logistics of a massive business.
“This an exciting milestone, and it’s really because it’s about transitioning to real-life applications. If you’ve got a simulation of a problem and you can run it large enough scale, there’s no barrier to what you can do with this,” he said.
Tesla Cybercab is going to get some pretty substantial updates, including improvements to efficiency and a new color.
CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X on Saturday that Tesla would be working to refine the Cybercab even more, following the announcement during the week that the company would eliminate the Cybertruck lines within Giga Texas for more Cybercab manufacturing capacity.
“There are efficiency improvements coming that will allow for a 40kWh Cybercab pack,” Musk posted on X. “We will make this in liquid silver, so the colors are not too monotonous.”
There are efficiency improvements coming that will allow for a 40kWh Cybercab pack. We will make this in liquid silver, so the colors are not too monotonous.
The biggest thing most people fail to understand is that there are a very limited number of smart, dedicated people! They can only do so many things.
If we have to maintain a complex production line, supply chain and allocate engineering for Cybertruck, we can’t use those people or factory space and machinery for scaling Cybercab, which is the vehicle that will PROFOUNDLY transform the world of terrestrial transport!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2026
A new, more efficient model of the Cybercab will be engineered, which will only help Tesla’s profitability and margins, and it also boosts the argument for why the Cybertruck should be discontinued, at least from a business perspective.
The current Cybercab that operates in the Robotaxi platform in Austin, Texas, has a 48 kWh pack, and it sounds like Musk believes Tesla is on its way to introducing a version that has fewer cells but can manage the same workload thanks to engineering efficiencies.
Credit: Tesla
Musk also doubled down on the decision to prioritize Cybercab production over Cybertruck, which is a decision that has been extremely polarizing within the community, and many fans have made it abundantly clear that they are not particularly pleased with the plans.
“If we have to maintain a complex production line, supply chain, and allocate engineering for Cybertruck, we can’t use those people or factory space and machinery for scaling Cybercab, which is the vehicle that will PROFOUNDLY transform the world of terrestrial transport,” Musk said.
A good look at Tesla’s new Liquid Silver Cybercab, planned with a 40 kWh battery pack following new improvements
😍 https://t.co/IUYsUcCBMs
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 8, 2026
Cybercab is obviously Tesla’s path forward in an automotive sense. It seems that Tesla is less concerned about catering to the passenger vehicle market and is more prone to focus on transforming passenger transportation in a way that prioritizes autonomy. However, this requires some sacrifice on Tesla’s end, and the Cybertruck is unfortunately a victim of this.
Cybercab holds an extremely crucial part of Tesla’s future. With the company already revolutionizing passenger transportation once, this is the next phase, and Cybercab is the path forward.
News
Tesla Robotaxi app update now tells riders if Cybercab is the better choice
Tesla’s Robotaxi app now shows ETAs, wait times and availability for Cybercab and Model Y.
Tesla has rolled out a new vehicle selection screen in its Robotaxi app, and it puts the numbers riders care about most in front of them before they book.
Version 26.11.0 of the app shows the estimated arrival time, the expected wait and current availability for each vehicle option on a single screen, according to a video shared by @gheeunit on X on November 7. Riders deciding between a Cybercab and a Model Y Robotaxi can now compare those figures side by side instead of picking a car first and learning how long it will take afterward.
Tesla first gave riders that choice on September 3, the day paid Cybercab rides began in Austin. The original version of the screen listed the Cybercab, which seats two, next to the Model Y, which seats four. A later build, 26.8.2, added a seating capacity indicator so groups knew which car would fit them. What it did not show was whether choosing the Cybercab meant standing on the curb a few extra minutes.
Newest version of @robotaxi app has a new vehicle selector UI for choosing between Cybercab and Model Y and shows you the fare for both simultaneously! https://t.co/7qoDQ0vACX — mantequilla 🧈 (@gheeunit) November 7, 2026
That question matters more now than it did two months ago. Tesla had 45 Cybercabs on the Texas DMV roster when rides started. By late October the state listed 573, alongside 631 Model Ys, and community trackers logged a record 1,576 Cybercab sightings across Austin on Halloween alone. With two large fleets sharing one service area, the closest car and the quickest pickup are not always the same vehicle.
Inline availability also changes what happens when demand spikes. If no Cybercab is free nearby, the rider sees that on the selection screen rather than after trying to book one.
For now the comparison is mostly an Austin feature. Riders in Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and the Florida markets are still matched with Model Y vehicles, though Tesla said on its third quarter earnings call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas this month.
The update follows a steady run of smaller changes to the rider experience. Late last month Tesla brought a quiet mode that blacks out the cabin screen to Model Y Robotaxis after first testing it in the Cybercab, and it has stretched Austin service to run from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.
The Cybercab side of that selection screen is about to get much busier. Elon Musk said this week that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of 2027 to make room for more Cybercab output, and Tesla has said it is aiming to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year.
Tesla has not published official release notes for version 26.11.0.
Tesla is ending Cybertruck production sometime in mid-2027, according to CEO Elon Musk.
Musk made the announcement on X last night, which came as a shock to many. He said that the Cybertruck will end production “to make room for increased Cybercab production” at Gigafactory Texas.
It is a huge blow to the fans of Tesla who have come to love the Cybertruck and identify with it as a symbol of their fandom. It has been the best-selling electric pickup, but it has had an underwhelming sales performance in terms of what was expected. This is mostly due to Tesla not meeting the prices it planned to offer the Cybertruck, as its unveiling and actual release were four years apart.
Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2026
Overall, the responses were mixed. Some fans understood the move toward Cybercab production, especially as Tesla is truly pushing the autonomous future through its Robotaxi platform. However, others did not understand it.
“Damn, how many Cybercabs do you guys need?” one response read. Another said it was “Sad but understandable.”Even analyst Gary Black had responded to the news, stating he hoped Tesla planned to replace it with a traditional pickup design.
It doesn’t seem like that will be the case.
Tesla is so hell-bent on delivering autonomy and eventually providing a driverless service that owning a car seems like an arbitrary idea, according to their thesis. Instead, Cybercabs will be available to pick you up and drop you off on demand, safely, without any human help.
As a result, Tesla has thinned its lineup considerably, and one can only ask where the vehicle lineup goes from here. Eventually, it seems like Cybercab could be the only vehicle that Tesla will sell.
Tesla Cybercab is set to get some massive improvements
Tesla Robotaxi app update now tells riders if Cybercab is the better choice
