Exactly so. While this is a major advance, I roll my eyes at the sea of comments hailing the arrival of a superior intelligence.
When the AI is cognizant of the fact that Go is a game, and knows what a game is, and perceives that the game is taking place in a larger reality, where there are other things happening while the game is going on....then I'll be impressed.
Or maybe not. The history of AI is one of humans always moving the goalposts when AI advances.
Chess? just a computationally simple game.
Driving? Well it's just physics.
Go? now that requires intelligence oh wait, just some deep neural savant thing, not real AI
Well, I think what I'm describing (general awareness) is a little different from your examples there, but I acknowledge my choice of words implied I'm not impressed, which I completely am because this is obviously utterly amazing. It's just not AS big a deal as a lot of people are making it out to be with proclamations of apocalypse.
Huh? IBM Watson was able to answer trivia questions based on some impressive NLP (that I'd like to see more widely available) and a huge database of factual information. Oh, and it was able to beat humans in buzzing in. Watson was impressive, no doubt about it. But it certainly didn't have any meta knowledge of its place in the world or in a contest.
What I mean is that the IBM Watson deals effectively deals with semantic information.
You can make some analogies between sparse matrix data representations and what happens in the mammalian neocortex. It is of course not self conscious, but it effectively deals with semantic information and relationships among it.
When the AI is cognizant of the fact that Go is a game, and knows what a game is, and perceives that the game is taking place in a larger reality, where there are other things happening while the game is going on....then I'll be impressed.