It was misquoted. What he said was that he had cracked his go board when he threw it against the wall after getting frustrated at its intractability.

Deepmind have done something, namely published a paper about a neural net being about as good as an amateur mid-high dan at predicting the next move of a pro game (55%), though the actual playing strength of that approach was less clear or impressive. Something neural nets trained on pro games tend to suffer from is not knowing how to play against bad moves, for example there was one game I saw where the neural net played a crane's nest tesuji to capture some key stones and then when the opponent tried to escape, which should have been futile as any 15k knows, it let it escape as presumably pros never try such a futile attempt so it hadn't been trained how to respond to that pattern.