"A “Manhattan Project” for artificial intelligence is how Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, described his company in 2010, when I was one of its first investors. I took it as figurative grandiosity. I should have taken it as a literal warning sign, because that is how it was taken in foreign capitals that were paying close attention. Now almost a decade later, DeepMind is the crown jewel of Google’s A.I. effort. It has been the object of intense fascination in East Asia especially since March 2016 when its AlphaGo software project beat Lee Sedol, a champion of the ancient strategic board game of Go..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/opinion/peter-thiel-google.html