He is yet to produce something useful. Why celebrate him now? Google PR?
The only thing that really impressed me so far was that ibm computer playing jeopardy, but the fact that no other application became public after all this years make me wonder if once again all people built was a manually tuned specialized system.
Note : i'm not in the field so my feelings are just based on the communication around the subject and decades of claims about building an intelligent algorithm with no success.
Did those games had any kind of random behavior or does the same things happen all the time at the same time ?
It is a progress, i agree, but all those games are just about issueing sequences of "left right" commands to maximize the time spent playing the game.
Things would be a lot different if they could somehow analyze the structure of the network's "conceptual" layer to identify functions over areas ( like " this is where ball trajectory is identified, and we can see it rest and activate depending on the ball's motion" or something similar). But the slide on his presentation shows a big question mark there, which isn't really reassuring.