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Well he bet on neural networks in the early days when it was unpopular, and that turned out to be the right trajectory.

He received a Turing Award for his work that was foundational to the current state of the art.

Your argument sounds like (and correct me if I'm wrong) something along the lines of "he chose to do X, and afterwards X was the correct choice, so he must be good at choosing correctly."

Isn't that ad hoc ergo propter hoc?

That argument would also support the statement "he went all in with 2-7 preflop, and won the hand, so he must be good at poker" -- I assume you and I would both agree that statement is not true. So why does it apply in Geoffrey's case?

It was a straightforward response to "I simply mean his track record of predicting the future trajectory of AI is not great."

I still don't follow. In your example, how would you differentiate between that choice of his being lucky vs. prescient? Or was the intent to just provide a single datapoint of him appearing to make a correct choice?

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