Ten years after DeepMind’s AlphaGo stunned the world by defeating Go champion Lee Sedol in Seoul, the match still stands as a defining moment for modern artificial intelligence. The system’s uncanny, “intuitive” play—celebrated even by Google co-founder Sergey Brin—signaled that deep learning and reinforcement learning had crossed a threshold from narrow pattern matching to strategic reasoning. In the decade since, the breakthrough helped catalyze a broader AI boom, accelerating research investment and seeding advances far beyond board games. While the promise has grown—spanning industry, science and consumer applications—the legacy also includes unresolved questions about reliability, oversight and societal impact. The anniversary underscores how a single televised contest reshaped expectations for AI’s capabilities and set the pace for today’s rapid innovation.
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