No doubt? Seriously? What kind of knowledge do you have to make such statements? There are plenty of examples where technology has rapidly advanced to some remarkable level, but then almost completely plateaued. For example, space travel or Tesla's work on applications of electromagnetism. Heck, even other areas of AI research.

I really don't see why people here readily assume that this particular approach to computers playing Go is easily improvable. Neither do I see why everyone assumes there will be no discoveries of anti-AI strategies that will work well against it.

With neural networks involved, it's hard to say. And all we have so far is information about about, what, 15 games? Some of which were won by people. Mind you, those people never played AlphaGo before, while the bot benefited from a myriad of training samples, as well as from Go expertise of some of its creators.

I'm also tired of all the statements about "accelerating progress". It's not like all the AI research of the past was useless until DNNs came along. That's the narrative I often get from the media, but it misrepresents the history of the field. There was no shortage of working ML/AI algorithms in the past decades. The main problem was always at applying them to real-world things in useful ways. And in that sense, AlphaGo isn't much different from Deep Blue.

One big shift in the field is that these days a lot of AI research is done by corporations rather than universities. Corporations are much better at selling whatever they do as "useful", which isn't such a good thing in the long run. We're redefining progress as we go and moving goalposts for every new development.