The article sounds doubtful: the smart guys gathered and invented something, but, as I understand (having jumped paragraphs to save time), they only patented their ideas, neither evaluating, nor testing any of them. This may lead to making a set of useless patents that nobody will ever try to use.
Imagine that instead of YC there were a "think tank", a gathering of people who would invent websites or startups and then just document the ideas. This can be much more entertaining and may seem a deeper thought than advising on and evaluating the "materialized" projects. But how many projects, that sound nice, will ever be done, and how successful can they be?