The headline makes it sound like he's being super-arrogant, but his actual words tell a very different story.
Edit: I just looked up his Weibo, and it turns out that he said only what is quoted in the headline on Weibo; that deeper analysis was, presumably, from a later interview which he didn't post on Weibo at all.
Also, I don't think it sounds super arrogant. The fact that AlphaGo beats someone beaten by Ke Jie 8 times out of 10 doesn't say enough about AlphaGo vs. Ke Jie. As Jie himself pointed out, eventually AlphaGo will be able to beat him, but claiming that it cannot do this now sounds pretty safe to me.
8:2 implies the difference between them isn't so large. (If someone only beat me 8:2, I'd expect a professional to beat them 10:0.) Do we have any particular reason to think that AlphaGo would fall within that narrow skill band?
E.g. if Google specifically challenged Lee, thinking that AG had just about passed his level.
Alternatively by looking at the games and saying "Ke beat Lee by more than AG did, so Ke will beat AG as well". But many people have pointed out that AG doesn't optimize for winning by the greatest amount, so this probably isn't very informative.
Alternatively if AG's playstyle is strong against Lee but weak against Ke. But could Ke know that? AG's only played against two high-profile opponents, if it can adapt its playstyle we won't have seen that in action.
Another way to look at it, if Ke beats Lee 8:2 then Lee-plus-four-stones probably beats Ke more than half the time. (I'm pretty confident about four stones; I suspect two or three would suffice.) Four stones is significant, but it's still a fairly narrow gap to say "I think AG falls within this skill range" until you've seen it lose a game.
Games at this level are decided by a few points. The closer two players come to optimal play, the harder it is to be very much more efficient than your opponent over the course of a game. To be so much more efficient, at this level, that you could overcome a 4 stone handicap is unthinkable.
I would very much like to see computers improve to the level that they could take on a top professional giving a 2 stone handicap. That would be a sight!
That's especially true when one of your players is a robot, which learns in a different way than humans. Yes, it's running a neural network, but a neural network still isn't a brain. Every person's brain is slightly differently organized on the neural level. On the other hand, every NN is running more or less the same structure and backpropagation algorithms. If you can find where those algorithms are strategically weak, you'll be able to beat them consistently.
But yes, I spoke about playstyles. Do you think Ke can discover exploitable weaknesses in AG, given the games AG's played?
For example a CNN does well at object recognition from photos, but does poorly at recognizing a pencil sketch of an object it hasn't previously seen a sketch of. Or recognizing a scene at night that it has only seen daytime photos of. Those tasks, humans do very well because the trained human brain combines cultural understanding, physics intuition, and visual cortex at the same time, and would be able to use this to their advantage to easily beat, say, a massively trained CNN image recognition program that lacks cultural understanding and physics intuition.
Some other more complex NN structure may be able to tackle these kind of tasks, but as long as its neural structure is rigid, it will have yet other deficiencies. The human brain is still able to structurally adapt in ways that NNs cannot, yet.
For people outside of Go community, Ke Jie is the new star of Go, currently Jie's Elo rating is #1, http://www.goratings.org/, Lee Sedol is #4. Media touted Lee Sedol as the greatest player of past decade, it was true couple years ago but Lee Sedol has been clearly in decline in recent years (as seen in the Elo rating).
2) Ke Jie is 19, at the peak age of his game. Lee Sedol is 33 and is seemingly in decline in his game, hence the 2:8 record vs. Ke Jie.
3) Ke Jie probably wanted to be challenged since he is the current world's #1 Go player. Sure there aren't much differences in terms of skill levels between top Pro 9 dan players but challenging a current world's #4 player is different from challenging a current world #1 player, isn't it?
It's a shame that the Western world doesn't know Ke Jie well(as his wikipedia page has very limited info and his award records.)[1] But these are moot points. After the 2nd defeat, it's increasingly clear that AlphaGo will defeat human player - it's a matter of time or a matter of a couple more games.
That's your wishful thinking.
As we've seen the matches with Fan Hui in the past, unfortunately and fortunately, the CNN will improve drastically game after game and making less mistakes whereas human always do at a certain level.
Another big point I want to point out is human emotion and state of the mind. With 0:2, Lee Sedol lost his confidence ("speechless" in his own words) [1] and quite possibly increasing fear of losing in a landslide 0:5. Losing confidence and fear of losing are VERY TERRIBLE things in any competitive sports.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/10/11191184/lee-sedol-alphago...
The one to beat is Ke Jie because he is currently two times stronger than Lee Sedol.
Weaker players are more inconsistent. Someone else says Lee-plus-two stones beats Ke. I don't think me-plus-two-stones dominates someone who beats me 8:2.
So with weaker players, 8:2 is consistent with a wider range of skill gaps (measured in handicap stones). It's consistent with one player being only a little better, and it's consistent with one player being a lot better.
With two of the best players in the world, 8:2 isn't consistent with more than two stones difference between them.
So in this case, 8:2 rules out a lot of possible skill gaps, which does say a lot; in the same way that "beats me 8:2" says a lot more than "beats me 10:0".
(Alternatively we can measure skill gaps in points. Games between weak players will often be decided by tens of points. Games between strong players will be decided by a handful. 8:2 between Lee and Ke suggests their points gap is smaller than between two amateurs who get 8:2.)
I assumed that, since this has been in the news, he's promoting himself to be next in line to take on the computer. The purpose being the publicity and earnings associated with participating in an event like this (it's not often Go makes it into the mainstream media).
I think that part is irrelevant because I think everyone knows that would be the case - that in a few months or years, the AI would exponentially improve.
And it will continue improving at about the same rate for the next few years, at least.
In the long term, meatware has no chance against it.
From what I've read, more processing power would allow the AI to calculate possible outcomes for each move further into the future but that does not mean the AI's overall success rate will go up at the same rate.