Machine learning is currently being used all over the place, in almost every single of Google's products. Projects like these may have a "fun" goal, but while

Machine learning is currently being used all over the place, in almost every single of Google's products. Projects like these may have a "fun" goal, but while reaching towards that objective, a lot of new techniques and theory is developed, which then gets used in real products. Systems like this are much easier to use as a playground and test in than the real world. But as they mention, the messiness and stateful nature of games like SC2 will bring a lot of innovation which will be very relevant to the real world.