The real irony is that Rémi said that in 2014. Sometime around then if not before deep learning was showing it could knock down more and more problems, it was pretty clear to anyone who was keeping up that if someone figured out how to combine deep learning with Rémi's work on monte-carlo tree search they ought to end up with a powerful go bot, perhaps even pro-beating. What took me personally by surprise was that the development (which also required a pretty large army of GPUs, though I wondered if we might see specialized hardware like deep blue) was done mostly out of the public eye, not even tests against humans on go servers, until suddenly it was announced the bot beat a 3p.

I think it may be rare that you see consensus on those sorts of "it's imminent, someone just has to do the work" problems because it requires simultaneous knowledge of multiple developments, and knowledge doesn't always disseminate as fast as it takes one group to just do the work. Now I'm remembering this related maxim: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_...