If they beat human performance in this (non-AI-building) field by humans painstakingly coding rules for specific situations, then that's cool I guess but not groundbreaking, because the solution doesn't generalise.
If they beat human performance in a field heretofore intractable by software by throwing the basic rules and a ton of compute at an algorithm and then waiting for six weeks while the algorithm figures the rest out by itself, then that absolutely is qualitatively different.
The reason being, of course, that if they can find an algorithm that works like this across a wide enough problem space then eventually they'll find an algorithm which will work on the question of "build a better algorithm." After which, as we know, all bets are off.
Emphatically not.
If they beat human performance in this (non-AI-building) field by humans painstakingly coding rules for specific situations, then that's cool I guess but not groundbreaking, because the solution doesn't generalise.
If they beat human performance in a field heretofore intractable by software by throwing the basic rules and a ton of compute at an algorithm and then waiting for six weeks while the algorithm figures the rest out by itself, then that absolutely is qualitatively different.
The reason being, of course, that if they can find an algorithm that works like this across a wide enough problem space then eventually they'll find an algorithm which will work on the question of "build a better algorithm." After which, as we know, all bets are off.