THE world’s best e-sports gamers have been beaten by an artificially intelligent bot in a major leap forward for the emerging technology.

The bot from Elon Musk-backed start-up OpenAI bested professional gamer Danylo Ishutin in games of Dota 2, a multiplayer battle arena video game. The popular online game is played in matches between two teams usually of five players, with each team occupying and defending their own separate base on the map.

Musk is hailing the achievement as the first time artificial intelligence has been able to beat pros in complicated competitive e-sports.

But he doesn’t necessarily think that’s a good thing.

OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017

While the demonstration was highly limited to a few variables of gameplay, it was still a remarkable achievement for the AI bot to crush its human opponent in a live 1-vs-1 match.

And for Elon Musk, it’s another sign our robot overlords are primed to take over.

“If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea,” he tweeted yesterday after the match.

He accompanied his warning with a rather odd photo of a poster depicting a worried woman and the words, “In the end, the machines will win.”

Funnily, the strange picture appears to be an old piece of anti-pokie, gambling addiction warning poster made by the Victorian state government.

If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea. pic.twitter.com/2z0tiid0lc — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017

Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm on AI general intelligence for years and believes government regulation could struggle to keep pace with rapidly advancing AI research.

“Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he told a group of US lawmakers last month about the tech sector’s furious pursuit of artificial intelligence.

Left unchecked, he thinks artificial intelligence could lead to our doom.

“Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” he said. “It takes forever.

“That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilisation. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation.”