Also, LeCun mentioned [3] "a chat with Kunihiko Fukushima in 1991", which states that "Fukushima started to work on a backprop version of the Neocognitron in 1989 or so but saw our 1989 paper in Neural Computation and gave up."
[1] LeCun et al., "Backpropagation applied to handwritten zip code recognition", 1989
[2] Fukushima et al., "Neocognitron: A self-organizing neural network model for a mechanism of pattern recognition unaffected by shift in position", 1980
Low hanging fruit successfully plucked, I guess.
Low hanging fruit is somewhat the opposite of sour grapes - I don’t want these grapes because they were probably sour versus so what if he got those sweet grapes - they were hanging low!
Maybe connecting “low hanging fruit” to “sour grapes” is “low hanging fruit” to some but it took a serious mental leap for me.