Lee Sedol reflects on AlphaGo match 10 years on: 'What did we do while DeepMind won a Nobel?'

Lee Sedol, a special professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), said Thursday he feels a sense of regret about what South Korea has accomplished in the decade since the AlphaGo matches that signaled the dawn of the AI revolution.

Lee pointed to the contrast with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and the man often called the "father of AlphaGo," who used the matches against Lee as a springboard to develop AlphaFold — an AI model that accurately predicts protein structures — and went on to win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. South Korea, Lee said, has little comparable achievement to show for it.

Speaking on the second day of the 2026 Korea Enterprises Federation Jeju Summer Business Forum at Lotte Hotel in Seogwipo, Jeju Island, Lee recounted episodes from his 2016 matches against AlphaGo, Google DeepMind's AI Go program, and outlined the direction he believes companies should take in the age of AI.

"I heard that CEO Hassabis gained confidence from the AlphaGo match, returned to the United Kingdom and developed AlphaFold — and ultimately won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry," Lee said. "The AlphaGo match took place in South Korea, and I felt a sense of regret asking myself what we had done with that."

Lee secured his place in history by winning one of the five matches against AlphaGo, earning the title of the only human ever to have defeated the AI.

Describing the matches as the biggest turning point of his life, he recalled that when Google first proposed the contest, he thought, "So Go is finally beginning — this could get dangerous in a few years." He added that while he had always assumed computers would eventually conquer Go as they had chess long before, he never imagined it would happen as early as 2016."

Admitting he had not "even thought about learning about AI and was not in the right mindset," Lee said that after losing the first two games he tried in the third match to force an early decisive confrontation, taking into account AlphaGo's computing power, but acknowledged it was a deeply mistaken decision.

"When there are too few stones on the board, humans cannot read ahead and must rely on instinct — but AlphaGo places each stone in the highest-probability position from the very first move," Lee said. "It ultimately becomes a fight between human instinct and AI data, and as everyone knows, data won by a landslide. That was the first time I felt how powerless human instinct could be."

Reflecting on the 68th move of the fourth game — the one he won — Lee said it was "a move I had never played in 30 years of Go." He drew a parallel to the present: "In the age of AI, we are living through an era no one has ever imagined or experienced, and we are ultimately being placed in situations where we must make decisions we have never made before."

"From that point on, humans and AI were clearly separated," Lee said. "In situations with clear and finite rules, AI shows overwhelming power, while humans plan, design, inject their own philosophy along the way, and make the final judgment." He advised that "if you have clear convictions and philosophy, you will be able to navigate the age of AI".

Lee also said the rise of AI is widening the gap between people at an accelerating pace.

"When AI programs spread through the Go world, I thought the overall level would rise and it would become harder for any single dominant player to emerge — but the opposite happened," he said. "It has become far harder for lower-ranked players to beat higher-ranked ones. It is like reaching for the stars."

He attributed the trend to top-ranked players understanding and using AI more effectively. "In the past, the gap widened gradually — now it is growing fast, at a pace that is impossible to keep up with," he said.

Lee also stressed that communication and cooperation are more important than ever in the AI era. "We are ultimately interdependent beings who exist to help one another," he said. "We may be in competition, but we are ultimately one team living through the AI era together. Through communication and cooperation, we must offer something that can shift the paradigm in the age of AI."