This mentality is pretty much precisely my gripe. There are plenty of things where "two students in a lab" can show considerable progress. I would wager there are more where this progress will not scale beyond where they got than there are where this is indicative of clearly superior methods.
Especially just comparing to the state of the art. In computing. Consider, people today can solve problems in minutes that the likes of Knuth were probably unable to solve years ago. I do not accept that the likes of Knuth were less capable compared to today's students.
So, just to be clear, you're taking issue with the mentality expressed as:
“They got dramatic results,” says Hinton. “Their very first results were about as good as the state of the art that had been fine-tuned for 30 years, and it was clear that if we could get results that good on the first serious try, we were going to end up getting much better results.”
I mean, these were Hinton's two students in Hinton's lab. They did some experiments and found promising results. Subsequent research built on and validated that promise. I'm having trouble understanding your problem. How would you propose people identifying promising research? Surely not by choosing approaches that do poorly, despite substantial resources and effort!
No no. I take issue with the mentality that just because two students in a lab can quickly approach state of the art, necessarily implies they have hit on a revolutionary approach.
I am all for promising results. But the "two students in a lab" is borderline meaningless to me. The real story is, "we performed some research, and it looked like it had promise. So we kept at it."
Basically, I reject the "it was clear that if we could get results that good on the first serious try..." I mean, first off, was it the first try, or the first serious try. Why the qualifier? Secondly, science and progress is full of things that were clear, but wrong.
I don't like arguing this point, as I do want to preserve the optimism that is in the air. However, it does grate at me, at times. It is essentially survivor bias in action.
Especially just comparing to the state of the art. In computing. Consider, people today can solve problems in minutes that the likes of Knuth were probably unable to solve years ago. I do not accept that the likes of Knuth were less capable compared to today's students.