AI Researcher Claims Modern Go Bots Match AlphaGo for $3K Using LLM Coding Assistance

What was said

"What took a whole team of research scientists at DeepMind and millions of dollars of research and compute can now be done for a few thousand dollars of rented compute. I spent maybe the first $4K doing exploratory research and then about $3K on the final run."

Eric Zhang, former VP of AI at 1X Technologies and ex-Google DeepMind senior research scientist, replicated AlphaGo-level performance on a budget of approximately $7,000 using modern compute and LLM-assisted coding. This represents a dramatic reduction from the estimated millions DeepMind spent, suggesting massive efficiency gains through better hardware, simplified architectures, and AI-assisted research. Zhang argues many of DeepMind's original algorithmic tricks are now unnecessary with modern GPUs and proper initialization against existing strong bots like Katago.