‘Every Single AI Researcher Making $10-100 Million is a Dota 2 Player’

Forget Ivy League degrees or internships at Google—the new secret to cracking the top AI jobs these days? Dota 2. If you are not playing, you are not going to make it. The notoriously challenging and endlessly complex Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) isn’t just a video game anymore; it has become a full-blown talent filter for the most elite AI researchers in the world. “What’s crazy about all of these top AI researchers making $10-100 million is that literally every single one of them is a Dota 2 player,” wrote a user in a viral post on X. “If you played Dota 2, there is a good chance that you were in a lobby with either them or me.” It might sound like a joke, but it’s not. Today’s top AI researchers—the ones earning million-dollar salaries—have likely spent over 5,000 hours getting flamed by strangers in a dimly lit room. Just ask Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, or Jakub Pachocki, who are key figures at OpenAI and the masterminds behind OpenAI Five, the bot that crush