AlphaGo Zero shows how business is losing the innovation game

Corporate laboratories once bankrolled basic fundamental research of the highest importance.

In this handout image provided by Google, South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-Dol reviews the match after the fourth match against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on March 13, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea — Google via Getty Images

By Tim Harford

It is hard not to be impressed — and perhaps a little alarmed — by the progression. In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov. It was a hugely expensive piece of hardware, closely tended and coached by humans.

Go is a far harder game for computers to master than chess. Yet when the AlphaGo programme emerged with muted fanfare in 2016, it comfortably outclassed the world’s best Go players after a few months of training.

Then last week, the AI research firm DeepMind unveiled AlphaGo Zero. It is faster, uses less hardware, beat its predecessor AlphaGo by 100 games to none, and is entirely self-taught. What is more, it achieved this performance after just 72 hours of practice.

The bewildering progress of AlphaGo Zero has fed an already-febrile anxiety about a robot takeover causing mass unemployment. Yet that anxiety sits uneasily with the high employment rates and disappointing productivity growth we see in the US and particularly the UK. There are plenty of jobs, but apparently not a lot of innovation.