[chunkmonke99]

I think the point is that universities and public research broadly speaking tolerate a lot of risk that private institution are not built to shoulder. I'm no AI historian but ANNs were an intellectual backwater after the 1st/2nd AI Winter and the only entities "foolish" enough to keep investing in them were Canadian public research universities. If it weren't for Hinton's dogged quasi-autistic special obsession with them ... no for profit entity would have bothered to invest in "computer power".