AlphaGo has had a tremendous impact on me personally. I wasn't involved in DeepMind, I don't play Go, or anything like that, but this system really opened my eyes to what is possible in the world of AI. Before AlphaGo, I was plying my trade working on supervised classifiers, clustering algorithms and their kin, and like any other data scientist, I was doing my best to gain insights from the data we had and having fun with all the geeky math stuff. Deep learning was a thing, but I didn't work in computer vision or speech recognition, so I didn't pay that much attention to it because SVM's, random forests and the like worked well enough for my purposes. But when the AlphaGo news broke, to me, that changed everything.
It was an eye opener that let me see what this technology is really capable of. For the first time, I let my imagination run wild as I read about the methods that made this system work so remarkably well. I started to see the applications beyond recommendation engines and classification that had dominated (and still does) the deep learning use cases and saw how this technology can change industries. That excitement and vision helped propel me to where I am today, working on research in this area to bring the technology and principles that made AlphaGo possible into the world of everyday work, to find new efficiencies in operations, and tackle problems that were deemed too difficult in the past.
All that to say that DeepMind's achievement was a remarkable watershed moment in the history of AI and helped shape the direction of my own life and career.
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