[conductrics]

I think what makes Hinton surprising is that he has a long established academic lab and so many current top researchers went through that lab. Yann LeCun (ANNs/Deep Learning), Chris Williams, (GPs), Carl Rasmussen (GPs), Peter Dayan (NeuroScince and TD-Learning), Sam Roweis (RIP). As you note, industrial research labs (with Nobel prize winning researchers) have been around at IBM, NEC, and ATT Bell etc. One thing that I think about, is what happens to the quality of research as top folks who have an established record of producing new researchers are pulled from that role? Also not sure about startups having anything to do with with making technology real. Is Google still a startup?