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I don't believe that's the case. The Atari results were achieved via Q-Learning with neural networks (DQN stands for Deep Q-Networks), both of which have been around for decades. The basic algorithm is something you can implement yourself fairly easily, but (as with most things involving neural nets) getting it to really perform takes a bit of expertise.

So, DeepMind's greatest asset is they employ some really excellent people and have a substantial head start in terms of actually implementing AIs and getting them to work.