Google-owned artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepMind has developed a new software program that learned by itself how to play the ancient Chinese strategy game Go in just three days.
The AI is so powerful that, having been told only the rules of Go, it derived thousands of years of human knowledge of the game before inventing better moves of its own.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
And the software could be reprogrammed to discover information in other fields, such as “drug discovery” and “particle physics”, says The Verge.
DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis, told BBC News: “We’re quite excited because we think this is now good enough to make some real progress on some real problems, even though we’re obviously a long way from full AI”.
Project leader David Silver told the news site that he hopes AI programs similar to AlphaGo Zero can be used for “advancing the frontiers of science and medicine”.
But while such technology could solve some serious global problems, humanity needs to “keep a close eye on the ethical dilemmas” that come with a machine that can think for itself, warns BBC technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones.
However, there are “ few signs that AlphaGo Zero and its ilk will either steal our jobs or threaten to make humanity obsolete”, for now, at least, he adds.
-
31 political cartoons for January 2026Cartoons Editorial cartoonists take on Donald Trump, ICE, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Greenland and more
-
Political cartoons for January 31Cartoons Saturday's political cartoons include congressional spin, Obamacare subsidies, and more
-
Syria’s Kurds: abandoned by their US allyTalking Point Ahmed al-Sharaa’s lightning offensive against Syrian Kurdistan belies his promise to respect the country’s ethnic minorities
-
Will AI kill the smartphone?In The Spotlight OpenAI and Meta want to unseat the ‘Lennon and McCartney’ of the gadget era
-
Claude Code: Anthropic’s wildly popular AI coding appThe Explainer Engineers and noncoders alike are helping the app go viral
-
Will regulators put a stop to Grok’s deepfake porn images of real people?Today’s Big Question Users command AI chatbot to undress pictures of women and children
-
Most data centers are being built in the wrong climateThe explainer Data centers require substantial water and energy. But certain locations are more strained than others, mainly due to rising temperatures.
-
The dark side of how kids are using AIUnder the Radar Chatbots have become places where children ‘talk about violence, explore romantic or sexual roleplay, and seek advice when no adult is watching’
-
Why 2025 was a pivotal year for AITalking Point The ‘hype’ and ‘hopes’ around artificial intelligence are ‘like nothing the world has seen before’
-
AI griefbots create a computerized afterlifeUnder the Radar Some say the machines help people mourn; others are skeptical
-
The robot revolutionFeature Advances in tech and AI are producing android machine workers. What will that mean for humans?
