For a change, maybe it'd be a good idea to get a CEO who at least has faint idea about how ML works on a technical level? Would you like a company that builds rockets to be led by some salesman who doesn't understand basic Physics? Probably not. You don't need to be Hinton or Schmidhuber, but come on, who thinks it's a good idea to have these typical "Silicon Valley VC CEOs" lead an AI company?
The trick is that execs do have unusually good insight into how their tech works, because they can ask their reports to explain it. Btw, I think it's funny how much credit Hinton gets for AI. His contribution is pretty much just keeping some grad students on the problem.
Yes, clearly overrated in terms of credit. Doing foundational work in the field going back to the 70s which laid the groundwork and inspired the resurgence of neural networks in the late 80s. Being a solid community organiser throughout his career and keeping neural network research alive through the more formal statistical methods dominating for over a decade. Supervising and thus raising many others who themselves contributed greatly to the explosion of neural network utility we have seen since around 2010 until now. Should I carry on?
I think it is absolutely clear that Hinton has contributed plenty enough to get a massive amount of credit for where we are today. The kind of mentality at display here is akin to ahistoricity on the level of saying that Gordon Moore "just started a company" after Apple released the M1 under the delusion that there is not a direct lineage between what we have today and breakthroughs and efforts in the past. Believe it or not, but we stand on the shoulders of giants and cutting them some slack is not the same as downplaying the impact of people more active in the present day; that are gradually becoming future giants.