Ross: Porting AlphaGo to TPUs jumped its ELO by hundreds of points
Jonathan Ross · Why Asking the Right Questions Is the Most Important Skill in the AI Age · Jul 5, 2026 · at 31:00
Groq founder Jonathan Ross explains how DeepMind ported AlphaGo to Google TPUs 30 days before defeating world Go champion Lee Sedol.
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“AlphaGo running on GPUs had an ELO score of about 3200. Lease it all was about 35, 35 50. And I might be getting the first digit wrong. It might be 2000 instead of 3000. But like, you know, it was more than 200. And then when put on on TPUs, it actually went to like 3900 or something ridiculous, or 2900, whatever the first digit was. It jumped dramatically. And so I think he didn't expect he was going to lose, but he lost badly. But it was the exact same model. So what changed was the ability to compute more made the results smarter.”
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