I'm not a fanboy, far from it. I'm not affiliated with the lab or his work. I'm not even a big fan of machine learning. But Hinton's contributions to the field cannot be understated. He single-handedly kept it alive for two decades amid a massive lack of funding. Anyone who has worked in research will attest that this is an incredible feat.

People on Hacker News seems to idolize the lone genius who somehow pulled himself up from his bootstraps. That person does not exist. The truth is that great minds are made, moulded into shape. That the best people behind our AI technology emerged from his lab is no coincidence. Those trash-talking Hinton on this forum are unlikely to achieve 1/100th of what he has accomplished.

“The housecat may mock the tiger,” said the master, “but doing so will not make his purr into a roar.” [1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html

Ah, someone who enjoys defending his tigers against cats. Well, enjoy your low hanging fruits, tiger. Someone "so knowledgeable" and totally not a poster boy making bold claims that don't come true at all will continue not making sense to me. But don't get me wrong, I know this is an old man shakes fist at cloud kind of situation. Who cares what doesn't make sense to me anyway? My academic circles don't, and they do fine. I continue to contribute what little I can. But my field is more SR than NN.