No.
Hinton "discovered" stacking ensembles and gave it a new name, fancy analogies to biological brains and then made it worse.
The gist of this is that you can select a computational unit, be it a linear layer, or a collection of layers, compute the derivative of the output with respect to the parameters, and update them.
Each computational unit is independent, meaning that you don't calculate gradients going outside of it.
This is the same as training a bunch of networks, computing predictions, and then using another layer to combine the predictions. This is called stacking, and the networks are called an "ensemble". You can do this multiple times and have N levels of meta estimators.
Instead of fitting the ensemble and then the meta estimator, Hinton proposes training both simultaneously but without allowing gradients to flow through.
That is stupid because if you don't allow gradients to flow through, you will see a context drift as the data distribution changes. Hinton observed this context drift, to deal with that, he proposed normalizing the data.
On one extreme, you can use individual linear units as the models, and on the other extreme, you can combine all units into a single neural network and treat that as a module.
So no, this does not open any new design, it's an old idea, worsened, and wrapped in fancy words and post-facto reasoning.
If you are curious how a linear layer is an ensemble, observe that each vector is its own linear estimator, making the linear mapping an ensemble of estimators.