Another field is being upended by deep learning methods, that's what happened. A small team from DeepMind with mainly AI/ML expertise won first place at a prom

Another field is being upended by deep learning methods, that's what happened. A small team from DeepMind with mainly AI/ML expertise won first place at a prominent academic competition, besting teams of experts by a surprising margin. Academics who have invested a lifetime studying and working on the problem are suddenly wondering if their skills and experience are at risk of becoming less relevant. They're wondering, how could a bunch of neophytes pull this off? Is this just the opening salvo? A natural reaction will be to dismiss this as "nothing new, just better engineering and clever hacking with more resources." Another reaction will be to dismiss deep learning techniques as "curve-fitting without insight." Such dismissals are misguided in my view. Judging by how quickly deep learning methods have become the dominant approach for producing state-of-the-art results in other fields, I would expect the same thing to happen in this field.