It's funny, articles like this might've inspired me a few years ago to go into this field, but the more that I learn about machine learning techniques, the more

It's funny, articles like this might've inspired me a few years ago to go into this field, but the more that I learn about machine learning techniques, the more skeptical I get when reading things like this. But it's not so much the technical details that bother me but the ethical problem of hype. Hype itself isn't necessarily bad, but throwing it into public at best garners a bunch of harmless clicks and at worst is misleading. I mean, I guess playing off of the whole "AI apocalypse" and the image of our computer overlords makes a quite evocative point. To be fair, this isn't just a problem with AlphaZero — similar problems in science journalism, especially in the field of medicine (i.e. Immortality is just a few decades away! Stem cells cure cancer!) seem to show up whenever a new or interesting result happens.