10 years of AlphaGo: The turning point for AI | Thore Graepel & Pushmeet Kohli
Google DeepMind
Mar 10, 2026
The AlphaGo victory against Lee Sedol proved that AI could transcend human intuition by combining deep learning with strategic search. This breakthrough shifted the AI paradigm from merely mimicking human data to discovering novel, counterintuitive solutions in complex domains like protein folding and algorithmic optimization, effectively moving beyond the limits of existing human knowledge.
Key insight: AlphaZero, the successor to AlphaGo, achieved superior performance by training entirely from scratch without any human game data, eventually discarding human-standard strategies in favor of 'alien' moves that proved more efficient.
