What would unsupervised mean, would unsupervised be something like alphago playing against itself trillions of times?

Whereas self-supervised, allows learning without explicit annotation of data ; but it doesn't matter if the models already trained on the entire Internet, and it's not like a game where it can come up with effectively new training data for itself?

fair point — OpenAI's original plan literally said "solve unsupervised learning". the self-supervised distinction wasnt really standard til after BERT/GPT popularized it