"In 2007, some of the leading thinkers behind deep neural networks organized an unofficial “satellite” meeting at the margins of a prestigious annual conference on artificial intelligence. The conference had rejected their request for an official workshop; deep neural nets were still a few years away from taking over AI."

The author almost makes this sound nefarious or short sighted. Workshops and symposia get rejected all the time for a mundane reason: Too many submissions for the available schedule resources at the conference. Important research gets "rejected" all the time, and the selection committees are not saying your topic/research are silly, illegitimate, or fantasy.