And I can tell you from my own experience that the managers stood down our shuttle launch when they had an unsolvedproblem that they still had to grapple with.
Dr Hinton's experiments have focused on hand-written letters and numbers (handwriting recognition being a crucial, and so-far unsolved, problem in machine vision).
By contrast, Silicon Valley companies often get started by people who work at a pillar company in the Valley who get an up-close look at a big, unsolved customer problem and start a company to tap the new market opportunity.