IMO the confident Tweets about how to become a good researcher and hire good researchers look pretty weird next to the lack of any apparent research papers (or even visible research products) five years later.
He was a weird dude. I think he grew up in a household where outrageous boasting was common and had been doing it so long that it was his authentic self. He desperately wanted people to be impressed with him, and he had mastered a strategy that had a consistent yield, but the people it didn't work on looked down on him pretty severely, and he didn't have any way of earning their respect. He had to trust in the fact that over time he would tend to find himself surrounded by people he could manipulate.
So the most logical way was to bootstrap an AI start-up in the area I'm interested, so that's what I'm doing. Unfortunately, it's hard to publish or contribute to open-source, since it becomes too easy to copy, which cuts my margins and ability to fund my research and compute.
Now I spend most of my days doing AI research, and outsource most other parts, really enjoying it :)
Wouldn't colorization count as research? In vision domain there are a lot of papers like this. Just arranging and rearranging known blocks and getting SOTA result on some datasets. ;)