Yes, and the point is that MIRI is pondering the situation at the finish line, but is not running in the race.
A different analogy would be that MIRI is looking at the map and the compass to figure out what's the right way to go, while others are just running in any random direction.
There have been a couple of brief discussions of this in the Open Thread, but it seems likely to generate more so here's a place for it.
The original paper in Nature about AlphaGo.
Google Asia Pacific blog, where results will be posted. DeepMind's YouTube channel, where the games are being live-streamed.
Discussion on Hacker News after AlphaGo's win of the first game.