[jxcole]

This seems to be Hinton's MO though. A few years back he ripped out convolutions for capsules and while he claims it's better and some people might claim it "has potential", no one really uses it for much because, as with this, the actual numerical performance is worse on the tests people care about (e.g. imagenet accuracy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_neural_network

[habitue]

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

[hgsgm]

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