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I mean yes, this should be the MO of a tenured professor, making large speculative bets, not hyper optimizing benchmarks

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But some of those bets should be right, or else he'd be better spending his time and accumulated knowledge writing a historical monograph.

The backpropagation paper was published in 1986.

It took >20 years for it to be right.

Maybe we ought to give this one some time?

Not sure what you mean by >20 years to be right. I built and trained a 3-layer back-propagating neural net to do OCR on an Apple 2 in 1989 based on that paper. Admittedly, just the 26 upper case characters. But it clearly worked better than the alternatives.

Specifically, tenure is to remove the pressure that "you'd better be right" so professors are free to take meandering tangents through the solution space that don't seem like they'll pay off immediately.

The failure mode of tenure is that the professor just rests on their past accomplishments and doesn't do anything. That's a risk the system takes. In this case though, Geoff Hinton is doing everything right: he's not only not sitting around doing nothing, he's actively trying to obsolete the paradigm he helped usher in, just in case there is a better option out there. I think that's admirable

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