Former OpenAI employee Przemyslaw ‘Psycho’ Debiak responded to a joke by Dendi regarding the famous 2017 showmatch at The International 2017. Dendi posted on X that if he had defeated the OpenAI bot, global AI progress might have stopped.

Psycho supported this assumption, explaining that a loss would have drastically altered the trajectory of the organization. At the time, OpenAI operated as a little-known research lab with only about 50 employees before the TI7 event brought massive mainstream attention.

“You can laugh, but I am almost sure: if Dendi had won, OpenAI would have subsequently raised significantly less funds, and AI development would have been slower,” Psycho stated.

Behind the scenes, the developers were finalizing bot settings right up until the match and lacked confidence in the result after only one practice session following last-minute changes. Furthermore, the team hardcoded the item purchase order rather than letting the bot learn autonomously, a strategy professional players later copied under the assumption that it was optimal.