Right now, in the middle of history

I wonder: "What would it have felt like to be living in those times?". Well, here we are. It is happening, right now!

Growing up, I was fascinated by inflection points in the history of humankind. The first time humans learned to do something. Most people didn't always understand the impact at the time, but it changed our course.

I am now living through one of these moments!

My first hunch was in March 2016.

Our ears were still ringing from the first slap, at the end of the previous century, IBM's Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov leaving our human pride bruised. We continued to play chess, and watch chess games… but we already knew that no human could really beat computers anymore.

Go was to be our frontline, our new stand.

Surely, Go was safe. It had that mix of combinatorial complexity, driven by an astronomical number of legal board positions and deeply branching game trees and the ancient culture and wisdom of the game.

Or did I respect it because I consistently failed to learn any game strategy? (I had made multiple attempts to follow the series of articles in the legendary French gaming magazine "Jeux et Stratégie" in the 80s, it seemed that I mostly only learned to say "joseki" and count game ending territory.)

In any case… March 2016.

Google DeepMind had pitched AlphaGo in a 5 game match against Lee Sedol, South Korea's professional 9-dan Go player. He was widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the ancient board game.

I felt it. An electric tension on the internet maybe? Something might be up. At work, I was part of the Data Science team, and we had a thing about modelling, time series and deep learning. We had just videos of Reinforcement Learning playing and defeating Atari games, from repeated attempts and raw pixels only.

"Attention is all you need" had not yet been published, but I was already paying attention!

Lee Sedol was confidently predicting his victory against the machine, 5-0 or 4-1.

I borrowed an old spare laptop from my company's IT help desk and setup the big screen in the Orange zone of our office in Galaxis to stream the live matches.

The first game set the stage. Lee was maybe too confident, and ended up forced to resign. The entire global Go community fell into absolute shock. The news started to spread beyond our Data Science team.

The second game on the next day was the real kicker. AlphaGo's second victory in a row against a much more humble and cautions Lee Sedol. And the famous "Move 37". Move 37 even has its own scientific paper. Fan Hui's quote: "It's not a human move. I've never seen a human play this move. So beautiful". Computers were now not only beating "us humans", but they could actually invent new things. We were not ready for that.

I'll let you look up the rest of the story, but that was a first hint, wasn't it?

The second sign, "all your math are belong to us"

I'm not sure how I would feel if I were studying math right now. (says me who studied software engineering!)

The third sign

The Fourth sign

  • In September 2026, a prominent 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from the AI lab Anthropic, warning that major tech companies are "gambling with our lives". Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, stated that both companies are acting irresponsibly by racing to build self-improving superintelligence without adequate safeguards.
  • His resignation tweet went viral.

So, it's clearly happening! See follow-up thoughts here: Is resistance futile?

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