Ke Jie in Wuzhen
The world's top Go player lost 3-0 to AlphaGo in China this week, and Chinese viewers mostly couldn't watch it live. Why this match will matter more in China than the Lee Sedol one did.
AlphaGo beat Ke Jie three games to nothing in Wuzhen this week. Ke is 19 and has been ranked first in the world for most of the last two years. Last year after the Lee Sedol match he said on Weibo that AlphaGo wouldn’t beat him. This week, after the first game, he said that last year AlphaGo still played like a human, and this year it played like a god of Go.
The result itself wasn’t a surprise to anyone who’d been paying attention. In January a mystery account called “Master” went 60-0 in fast online games against top professionals, Ke included, and then revealed itself as a new version of AlphaGo. The match in Wuzhen confirmed what those games showed. DeepMind has also said this is AlphaGo’s last competitive match, and they’ll publish a set of its self-play games for players to study.
What I noticed more was how the match was received at home. Most mainland Chinese viewers couldn’t watch a live stream. Broadcasters were reportedly told not to carry it, and Google’s services are blocked there anyway. So the event was hosted in China, featured China’s best player, and was mostly followed through Weibo updates and foreign streams people found ways to reach.
It didn’t matter. I think this match will have a bigger effect in China than the Lee Sedol match had anywhere. Go isn’t just a game there. It’s part of the classical idea of cultivated intelligence, and it’s taught to kids as mental discipline. Watching a Chinese prodigy lose to a British-American company’s program, in a Chinese town, hits differently than watching a Korean player lose on TV. The conversations I’m seeing in my WeChat groups aren’t about whether AI is real anymore. They’re about why a Chinese lab didn’t do this.
China already has a lot of the ingredients. Baidu has had a serious AI lab for years, Tencent and Alibaba are hiring aggressively, face recognition startups like Face++ and SenseTime are raising large rounds, and the country produces enormous amounts of data and huge numbers of engineers. What it hasn’t had is a public moment that made AI feel like a national priority. My guess is that Wuzhen is that moment, and that we’ll see major government policy on AI from Beijing within months, with money behind it.
Ke Jie, for his part, handled it gracefully. He said he wanted to learn from AlphaGo’s games. I suspect a lot of Chinese engineers are going to feel the same way.