How an intern helped build the AI that shook the world

What’s Happening

Alright so Chris Maddison was just an intern when he kicked off working on the Go-playing AI that would at some point become AlphaGo.

A decade later, he talks about that match against Lee Sedol and what came next Technology How an intern helped build the AI that shook the world Chris Maddison was just an intern when he kicked off working on the Go-playing AI that would at some point become AlphaGo. In a stunning five-match series of Go , the ancient Chinese board game, the AI beat the world’s best player, Lee Sedol – a moment that was televised in front of millions and hailed a historic moment in the development of AI. (yes, really)

Chris Maddison , now a professor of AI at the University of Toronto, was then a master’s student and helped get the project off the ground.

The Details

It all began when Ilya Sutskever , who later went on to found OpenAI, got in touch Alex Wilkins: How did the idea for AlphaGo first come about? Chris Maddison: Ilya [Sutskever] gave me the following argument for why we should be working on Go.

He dropped, Chris, do you think when an expert player looks at the Go board, they can pick the best move in half a second? If you think they can, then that means that you can learn a pretty good policy to pick the best move using a neural net.

Why This Matters

The moment that kicked off the AI revolution The reason is that half a second is about the time it takes for your visual cortex to do one forward pass [a round of processing], and we already knew from ImageNET [an important AI image-recognition competition] that were pretty good at approximating things that only take one forward pass of your visual cortex. Free to The Weekly The best of New Scientist, including long-reads, culture, podcasts and news, each week. To I bought that argument, so I decided to join [Google Brain] as an intern in the summer of 2014.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

To I bought that argument, so I decided to join [Google Brain] as an intern in the summer of 2014. How did AlphaGo develop from there?

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