Highly glorifying, badly credited article that reads like a state propaganda piece. Hinton's work is amazing and his contribution has been immense, but this article is a joke.

Such science "journalism" is seriously hurting the field, including the researchers that are lionized in these articles. It also makes large groups of researchers who've been working hard on advancing the field think they don't matter in the eyes of the public, and that can be quite demoralizing.

That "unsupervised cats" paper from 2012 had nothing new in it at the time, although it was a feat of parallelization on a cluster of CPUs. Three years later its (uninteresting) results are not used anywhere. But Google used it as a PR piece at the time, and hundreds of journalists have been presenting it as some kind of game-changing breakthrough. It continues to this day.