It's certainly not the first NN chess program. You may remember one of OP author's Giraffe NN (https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.01549) which was essentially 'AlphaGo for chess'. But like the original AG, it struggles to learn and Lai had a lot less computation as a student than he does now at DM. What they're doing is applying AlphaGo Zero expert iteration with some simplifications and TPUs. And that pwns previous work like Giraffe the way AlphaGo Zero pwns AlphaGo. Quantity becomes a quality all its own.