In the sweltering heat of Shanghai, Jazzyear had the privilege of meeting Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, a distinguished guest at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
Based on years of earlier research, Schmidhuber and his student Sepp Hochreiter published the architecture and training algorithms for Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks in 1997 in a journal. This type of RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) is widely used by tech giants for applications in natural language processing, speech recognition, video games, and more, including Apple’s Siri and Google’s translation services. Prior to the advent of ChatGPT, LSTM was heralded as “the most commercially valuable achievement in AI.” The 1997 LSTM paper is the most cited AI paper of the 20th century, perhaps even the most cited computer science paper of the century.
Even earlier, in his “Annus Mirabilis” 1990-1991, Schmidhuber laid the foundations for Generative AI, by introducing the principles of what ‘s now called GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), non-normalized linear Transformers, and self-supervised Pretraining. These 3 contributions correspond to the “G,” “P,” and “T” in ChatGPT, where GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.
Long before the so-called “Deep Learning Trio” shared a Turing Award, Schmidhuber was already being hailed as the “Father of Mature AI” by The New York Times. Elon Musk also praised him on X, stating, “Schmidhuber invented it all.”
In 2013, the International Neural Network Society (INNS) awarded Schmidhuber the Helmholtz Award. In 2016, he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award in recognition of his "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." Currently, he serves as Scientific Director at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA and heads the AI initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. He is also involved with several AI companies.
Therefore, this 61-year-old German luminary has sparked a discourse: Why has Schmidhuber not won a Turing Award？
This is a key concern for many industry professionals, but it does not include Schmidhuber himself. During our two-day in-depth conversation, Schmidhuber, donning his signature stylish black beret and speaking fluent English with a German accent, came across as a scholar who combines humor with approachability. Yet beneath this amiable exterior lies an indomitable spirit, eager to establish scientific integrity in the fast moving field of AI research.
Discussing overlooked contributions of AI pioneers—particularly groundbreaking advancements achieved by small European labs before the tech giants took notice—Schmidhuber expressed a palpable urgency to correct misleading historical records of AI.
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