Your pocket calculator is superhuman at arithmetic. Alphago is superhuman at go. It's not a big deal.
If top humans get beat 5-0 with significant handicaps then it is likely AlphaGo is superhuman. However, it is expensive to run AlphaGo so it is unlikely that we will know the true strength of AlphaGo for a while (more challenges) or until hardware catches up.
Update: typos and clarifications
Ok flippancy aside, there are two problems that make techniques like this single-domain: network design and network training.
The design, uses multiple networks for different goals: board eval (what boards look good) and policy (which moves to focus on). Those two goals, eval and policy, are very specific to go. Just like category layers are specific to vision and LSTM is specific to sequence learning.
Network training is obviously hugely resource intensive -- and each significantly complex problem would need such intensity.
It is amazing the variety of problems DNNs have been able to do well in. However, the problem of network design and efficient training are significant barriers to generalization.
When network design can be addressed algorithmically I think we may have an AGI. However, that is a significant problem where you automatically add another layer of computational complexity so it is not on the immediate horizon and may be 50+ years down the road.
AlphaGo is rather different in that it actually has a representation of the game of Go and it knows how to play. I don't doubt at all that it's intelligent, in the restricted domain it operates in. But I do doubt that it's possible for an intelligence built by humans to be "superhuman" and I don't see how your one-liner addresses that.
Why would an intelligence built by humans not be able to be superhuman? The generally accepted definition seems to be "having better than human performance" in which case it seems we've done it many times (like with calculators).
I don't think there's a generally accepted definition and I don't agree that performance on its own is a good measure. Humans are certainly not as good at mechanical tasks as machines are -duh. But how can you call "superhuman" something that doesn't even know what it's doing, even as it's doing it faster and more accurately than us?
Take arithmetic again. We know that cat's can't do arithmetic, because they don't understand numbers, so it's safe to say humans have super-feline arithmetic ability. But then, how is a pocket calculator super-human, if it doesn't know what numbers are for, any more than a cat does? There's something missing from the definition and therefore the measurement of the task.
I don't claim to have this missing something, mind you.
>> Why would an intelligence built by humans not be able to be superhuman?
Ah. Apologies, I got carried away a bit there. I meant to discuss how I doubt we can create superhuman intelligence using machine learing specifically. My thinking goes like this: we train machine learning algorithms using examples; to train an algorithm to exhibit superhuman intelligence we'd need examples of superhuman intelligence; we can't produce such examples because our intelligence is merely human; therefore we can't train a superhuman intelligence.
I also doubt that we can create a superhuman intelligence in any other way, at least intentionally, or that we would be able to recognise one if we created it by chance, but I'm not prepared to argue this. Again, sorry about that.
Hm. Strictly speaking I believe my pocket calculator has an FPGA, a general-purpose architecture that in my calculator happens to be programmed for arithmetic, specifically. So I think it's accurate for me to say that, although the calculator has a program and that program certainly is a representation of arithmetic, I have to provide the interpretation of the program and reify the representation as arithmetic.
In other words, the program is a representation of arithmetic to me, not to the calculator. The calculator might as well be programmed to randomly beep, and it wouldn't have any way to know the difference.
(But that'd be a cruel thing to do to the poor calculator).