I understand where the article is coming from, but it sounds to me like a classic case of projecting their biases (i.e. the author has very strong feelings about a topic which is pretty marginal to the research papers themselves, and interprets the claims made in the papers through the lens of a worldview in which that topic is very important) For example, AlphaGo Zero makes claims about not using any human (Go) knowledge, which is, by human standards, pretty close to true. It mostly only uses general assumptions which would apply to most turn-based, perfect information board games. While that is certainly "knowledge about Go" in the strictest sense, such a distinction is pretty irrelevant in practice. The paper never claimed it had spawned an AGI that could solve any general problem without human intervention -- the context makes it pretty clear that the research applies to a narrow domain, and I don't believe any claims are made about not making any assumptions which rely on the properties of that narrow domain (indeed, such assumptions existing is pretty much a given -- whether they were implemented on purpose or by pure chance, the fact that it works in a domain and not in another is proof that this is the case)