From games to biology and beyond: 10 years of AlphaGo’s impact
Google DeepMind
AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sae Dol at Go in 2016, marking the beginning of modern artificial intelligence and demonstrating that AI could discover novel strategies beyond human expertise. The system's techniques have since been applied to protein folding (AlphaFold 2 solved a 50-year challenge and now serves over 3 million researchers), mathematical reasoning (achieving silver-medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2024), and algorithm discovery (AlphaEvolve found novel matrix multiplication methods). These applications are now converging toward artificial general intelligence, with DeepMind integrating AlphaGo's search and planning methods into its Gemini models alongside specialized scientific tools.
Why it matters
Ten years since AlphaGo, we explore how it is catalyzing scientific discovery and paving a path to AGI.
