If you don't know who Geoffrey Hinton is, I suggest you make a trip to Wikipedia post haste. Our modern LLM renaissance wouldn't exist without him.
Hinton published the seminal paper on backpropagation. He also invented Boltzmann machines, unsupervised learning and mixture of ecperts models. He championed machine learning for 20 years even though there was zero funding for it through the 80s and 90s. He was Yann LeCun's PhD adviser. That means Yann LeCun didn't know ass from tea kettle until Hinton introduced him to machine learning.
Know perchance a fellow by the name of Ilya Sutskever? ChatGPT ring any bells? Also a student of Hinton's. The list is very long.
I know the backprop paper. I've read it in the early 2000s. And I remember Hinton as a co-author. Same with Boltzmann machines. Co-author. "Advisor to that great guy", "Teacher of this great guy", "Nobel price together with that guy" <- all of this leads me to the above conclusion. YMMV
Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe.
People on Hacker News seems to idolize the lone genius who somehow pulled himself up from his bootstraps. That person does not exist. The truth is that great minds are made, moulded into shape. That the best people behind our AI technology emerged from his lab is no coincidence. Those trash-talking Hinton on this forum are unlikely to achieve 1/100th of what he has accomplished.
“The housecat may mock the tiger,” said the master, “but doing so will not make his purr into a roar.” [1]
[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html
Do these historical accolades give him a blank check to be wrong in the present?
"sounds like he's a poster boy who rode on the success of others"
The person who wrote that didn't even bother checking who Hinton was before pulling that sentence out of their ass.