He is the co-founder and chief scientist[0] at OpenAI but "has he contributed that much personally". I don't even know how to respond to that

[0]https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilya-sutskever/

It's a bit in the category of "When you consider all factors, how important was Isaac Newton's work to Einstein's discoveries?"

I asked the question knowing that he's a co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI. Being in his position doesn't automatically mean that he's contributed meaningfully.

My experience in "Applied Research" is that often "good ideas from lower ranked researchers" (or good ideas from anyone really) is "I saw this cool paper, let's try and implement that". That doesn't mean top people like Hinton should get all the credit, but let's not kid ourselves and believe most of the ideas didn't origin in academia.

One of GOpenAI's recent breakthroughs was switching to FlashAttention, invented at Stanford and University at Buffalo.

Isn't Hinton's paper on backprop just a "let's try to implement that" for a multilayer network?

I'm not going to claim Hinton "invented backprop". He even says he didn't himself: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/g5ali0/com...