That's a bit out of context, no? The preceding sentence is > Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn’t build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.

so the contrast here is the budget available, not the quality of the talent, if we accept the premise that DeepMind and the universities have approximately similar level of talent.

It’d be less budget and resources than DeepMind.

So clearly it’s due to talent as well as advances, of course.