AlphaGo Shock 10 Years: From Engineering to AI Prodigies

The first class entered the Heavy Industry Academy established by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (now Hanwha Ocean). It was a solid course that promised employment at a large company upon graduation. After joining the company through an open recruitment service after graduating from high school at the age of 18, I worked in the ship equipment department for a full four years.

But on that day, March 9, 2016, the course of my life changed. Watching the match between Lee Sedol, 9th Dan, and Google’s Go artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo unfolding on the TV screen. Yoo Yoo-jin (32), who was 22 at the time, felt confused and yet somehow exhilarated. ‘The world will be completely different from now on.’

I resigned the following year. After studying on my own for two years to prepare for the Scholastic Ability Test, I became a freshman in the Class of 2019 in the Department of Convergence Software at Myongji University. Mr. Yoo said, “I was convinced that the size of the impact that software would have would grow, and I thought I would study thoroughly for four years.”

Mr. Yoo, who gained experience at several information technology (IT) companies after graduating from college, joined fintech startup Toss at the end of 2024 and is in charge of new business development. He said, “If I hadn’t seen that great country, I can’t imagine whether I would have stayed at the shipyard or tried to change something there,” and added, “The software industry has changed a lot from 10 years ago, but I don’t regret my choice because I think it’s still an industry that can make a big impact.”

On the 9th, it will be 10 years since the best human and AI faced off in the game of Baduk. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, was thrilled after AlphaGo defeated Lee 9-dan with 4 wins and 1 loss, saying, “We landed on the moon.” The shock wave immediately engulfed the world of baduk. Professional knights who quickly learned the numbers of AI and chose to coexist took the top rankings.

But it wasn’t just the baduk world that changed. A turning point has come in the lives of many people like Yu, who watched the match between humans and AI. This is the story of ‘AlphaGo Kids’ who changed their jobs and majors and took on a new challenge.

Hyuntae Hwang (33), CEO of SpaceY, which operates an AI conversion (AX) solution business for companies, watched AlphaGo play 10 years ago when he was a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Yonsei University and thought, ‘What is happening?’, so he searched the Internet and searched for related papers and materials. What impressed me the most was the reinforcement learning video of ‘DQN’, an AI algorithm developed by Google DeepMind. In the video, DQN plays a game of breaking bricks with a ball, and as the game progresses, they begin to come up with strategies to get better scores.

A video of a brick game played using DQN, an algorithm developed by Google DeepMind. Photo YouTube Capture

AI, which makes its own strategy, came as a great stimulus to CEO Hwang. I studied through night reading while translating the papers of AI scholars. In 2019, he wrote a doctoral thesis on methods for debugging (finding and solving errors) deep learning models. I completely changed my major, and my changed major led to starting a business. Currently, Space Y has AX partnerships with over 200 companies, including large companies such as SK Telecom, CJ, and Samyang. CEO Hwang said, “If it weren’t for AlphaGo, I probably would have been working as a postdoc in mechanical engineering without any major goals after graduation.”

As the AlphaGo kids predicted 10 years ago, 10 years later, AI has entered every corner of society. HR tech company Wanted Lab conducted a survey of 209 IT company employees from December 15 last year to January 5 this year, and found that 92.3% had used generative AI in the past year, including for work purposes, and 86.5% of them responded, “I use AI tools almost every day for work.” 33% of respondents responded, “There have been a lot of changes in my job since the advent of generative AI.” They predicted that within 10 years, due to AI, their jobs will be ‘replaced with repetitive tasks and people will take on higher value-added tasks’ (46.4%) and ‘most of them will be automated, so the demand for manpower will be greatly reduced’ (28.7%). In 2026, people are experiencing a major transformation in their work and daily lives, which is different from the ‘AlphaGo shock’.

Yoo Yong-gyun (48), a small nuclear reactor design expert and head of the artificial intelligence research lab at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, was shocked by the scene in which Kejie 9th Dan, who lost to AlphaGo in 2017, a year after the Lee Sedol-AlphaGo match, shed tears, saying, “I can’t think of a way to win.” Convinced that AI would change the world, he studied AI by watching YouTube videos after work.

I shared the information with my colleagues, and also wrote a letter to the director with the intention of saying, ‘It seems that applying AI to the nuclear field will be efficient, so let’s introduce it as well.’ Thanks to this, the Atomic Energy Research Institute established a new artificial intelligence application laboratory in 2020, and he is still working as the director. Director Yoo also runs a Daedeok Special District AI community called ‘AI Friends Society’ and is steadily expanding his work into AI.

Reporter Kim Kyung-jin

Lee Je-hyeon (47), head of AIX at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), was in charge of semiconductor 3D modeling at Samsung Electronics until 10 years ago. After the AlphaGo match, there was an ‘AI boom’ within the company, and all teams began competing to introduce AI. Director Lee’s team achieved good results thanks to team members who were studying machine learning at the time, and the company established a new AI department and entrusted it to Director Lee and his team members. Director Lee, who had less knowledge than practitioners, studied every day by watching online lectures such as ‘Deep Learning for Everyone’ by Kim Seong-hoon, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology at the time (currently CEO of Upstage), to understand the contents of the team members’ reports.

Director Lee, who wanted to solidify the foundation of his accidentally created AI career, moved to KIST in 2018 and began working on AI introduction as a practitioner. He said, “While studying AI, I realized the importance of ‘data pre-processing’, which cleans data into a form that is easy for AI models to learn, so I started with organizing thesis data at the research institute.” He added, “With the release of a powerful tool called ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the range of work that can be done has expanded.”

Geunyoung Jeong Designer

Change over the past 10 years has been at a pace that even AlphaGo kids could not have predicted. Representative Hwang told an anecdote in the abstract of his doctoral thesis in 2019 that said, “There is still a long way to go before AI can be applied to the business level,” and said, “The pace of development has accelerated dramatically since the 2020s as the paradigm has changed from ‘recognition’ to ‘generation.’” “I now feel that my imagination cannot keep up with the changes that will be brought about by AI,” said Director Yoo Yong-gyun. “In the future, we will have to think strategically about where and how to set up the ‘area of ​​automation’ in the work, where the AI ​​makes its own decisions and executes the work beyond simply asking the AI ​​to do the work.”

Wonjae Lee, a professor at KAIST Graduate School of Culture and Technology, said, “The degree of social uncertainty caused by AI is bound to be different for each generation before and after AlphaGo Kids,” and added, “Social response is needed to alleviate the shock caused by changes in skill sets required by society and jobs.”