Google AI versus the Go grandmaster – who is the real winner?

Today we were greeted by the front page of Nature hailing a breakthrough in artificial intelligence: computers are now outperforming even the best humans at the Chinese game of Go, long been seen as the last preserve of human game-playing mastery. The breakthrough, from a team based at Google's DeepMind group in London, has come much earlier than many experts expected. The achievement is also being hailed as a breakthrough in understanding human intelligence, and a large step towards emulating it. However, so was Deep Blue's achievement when it first beat chess world champion, Gary Kasparov, nearly 20 years ago. So where does this latest success really bring us?