AlphaGo was the tipping point, demonstrating that machines can be effective in a high-level/'creative' field with a vast search space, much larger than chess us

AlphaGo was the tipping point, demonstrating that machines can be effective in a high-level/'creative' field with a vast search space, much larger than chess using training rather than hand-written algorithms (that don't translate to other fields). No one expected Go to be solved to the degree and manner of AlphaGo for generations. It was the start of the great acceleration in ML since Deep RNN re-ignited the field.