A Game Plan for the AI Boom

Ten years ago, AlphaGo trounced human competitors--and its legacy is still present in today's most advanced bots. Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo--a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself. When Graepel faced it, AlphaGo was just a "baby" project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still took him down.