
Jürgen Schmidhuber says he’ll make machines smarter than us - CraneWorm
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/google-amazon-and-facebook-owe-j-rgen-schmidhuber-a-fortune
======
evrydayhustling
To cut through some of the drama that risks being amplified by profiles like
this, here are Schmidhuber's [1] and Goodfellow's [2] papers, plus the NIPS
reviews [3] that recognized the linkage (not equivalence) between the two.

This is the review process working as it should: helping situate work in a
longer dialog so that readers can follow a chain of reasoning. Much of the
rest of the drama discussed in this article is about allocating the celebrity
that manifests when a technique suddenly becomes useful, through some
combination of changes to the environment, theoretical improvements and
reduction to practice. It's a very human concern, but it's more business (or
politics) than science.

[1] ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/factorial.pdf [2]
[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-
nets...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets.pdf) [3]
[http://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips27...](http://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips27/reviews/1384.html)

~~~
piemonkey
Thanks for this, the reviews for this paper were very interesting.

I do wish that they provided the meta-review, however, which summarizes the
ultimate decision. Meta-reviews are written by area chairs, which are the
final arbiters for whether or not the paper is accepted. Seeing their
perspective on this paper would be very interesting.

------
jmarinez
For what it's worth, I'm certainly glad Schmidhuber is around. Not only for
his great accomplishments but also for the humanity he brings to science and
scientific research. In history, accomplishments of this kind are overlooked
at times as nothing more than footnotes in time completely overlooking the
human dynamics that exist in these highly competitive communities. The "drama"
is just as valuable as the resulting research. How many remember or even know
the spats between Newton and Leibniz? Tesla and just about everyone in his
time (Einstein, Marconi, etc)? He's right in bringing attention to all those
that contribute and to demand proper recognition.

Moreover, I also appreciate his focus of AI outside of the
marketing/advertising world. Google - just as an example - employees more PhDs
than any other public or private organization. All that brain power for the
sake of creating a better human trap - aka adtech. Jürgen's most important
plea is to use all this AI for real and tangible human progress. Nothing wrong
with that in my book.

------
konz
A related article by the same author (Ashlee Vance) two days later:

Apple and Its Rivals Bet Their Futures on These Men’s Dreams – An oral history
of artificial intelligence, as told by its godfathers, gadflies, and Justin
Trudeau.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/apple-
and...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/apple-and-its-
rivals-bet-their-futures-on-these-men-s-dreams)

~~~
kurthr
When LeCun only speculates on when the next advances (5-15 years) will come
and thinks that it will "take decades" to build systems on what we have... I
understand why "His (Schmidhuber's) peers wish he’d just shut up."

------
everdev
Most software excels in a single domain: driving, flying, recording, parsing,
etc.

I think AI being smarter than us in a single domain like investing is
feasible. But to be smarter than us in all domains, even parenting, love,
intuition, etc. sounds infinitely more challenging.

I think AI is usually thought of in terms of solving computationally-heavy or
data-heavy problems. But to be "smarter than us", it would need to be better
at emotional, conversational and relational problems as well.

~~~
nradov
Investing is not even remotely a single domain, unless you constrain it down
to something fairly trivial like making minority investments in publicly
traded US common stocks where being smarter doesn't really count for much.
There is so much trading activity now that the markets have become quite
efficient. In order to consistently generate alpha as an investor like Warren
Buffet you need access to material nonpublic information (proprietary
research), or some form of structural advantage. Those things require a huge
range of human skills, not just raw smarts.

~~~
justboxing
> material nonpublic information (proprietary research)

Agreed. Insider Trading.

~~~
nradov
Doing your own research isn't insider trading unless you get it from an
insider.

------
wenc
Schmidhuber sounds like the Nassim Nicholas Taleb of neural networks. Good
ideas, complicated personality.

~~~
carapace
I consider myself a fan of Schmidhuber.

He gives a talk that he starts with a joke. It's a self-referential self-
deprecating joke about Austrians, _and it 's funny_! The audience laughs.

I watched that and thought to myself, "This is a formidable man."

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/)

Cf. Gödel machine
[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine)

Also, "Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview" ("88 pages, 888
references"!)

> Abstract. In recent years, deep artificial neural networks (including
> recurrent ones) have won numerous contests in pattern recognition and
> machine learning. This historical survey compactly summarises relevant work,
> much of it from the previous millennium. Shallow and deep learners are
> distinguished by the depth of their credit assignment paths, which are
> chains of possibly learnable, causal links between actions and effects. I
> review deep supervised learning (also recapitulating the history of
> backpropagation), unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning &
> evolutionary computation, and indirect search for short programs encoding
> deep and large networks.

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-
overview.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html)

~~~
icc97
From [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-
overview.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html):

> Pronounce: You_again Shmidhoobuh

That's pretty good for a self-deprecating joke

------
icc97
I'd never heard of him, but certainly I'd heard of his LSTM network. Mostly
I've learned about the well know members of the AI community through Andrew
Ng's interviews with them in his coursera courses. Jürgen Schmidhuber is a
notable absentee (but I haven't done all the courses yet).

Plus the company he works for Nnaisense was the NIPS 2017 winner for the
'Reinforcement learning with musculoskeletal models' mentioned yesterday here
on HN [0].

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17092321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17092321)

------
takeitto
Unfortunate hit piece.

Even worse than having your peers crap on you, is the author stating that you
wish these crappy remarks don't define your profile (like they did previous
profiles), and then having exactly that happen.

This will now probably forever be his angle in the popular media: Godfather of
AI, mistaken, scoffed at by his peers. Not necessarily wrong, but not
flattering either.

I can relate to the gut-wrenching feeling of seeing your ideas being bandied
around as original, without any attribution. Of course someone in the field of
reinforcement learning is obsessed with the credit assignment problem, no
matter the time passed. How can AI researchers hope to solve this pressing
problem, when they can't even assign credit to the originators of their ideas?

I wonder if this harsh piece would have been written the way it was, if the
author realized that Schmidhuber may be on the spectrum, and that his erratic
and obsessive behavior is an ailment, not a deliberate choice.

In the future, Schmidhuber will be mentioned in the same breath as Turing. Of
his peers wishing he'd shut up, I don't have the same expectation.

------
vowelless
From the headline, I knew it would be about Schmidhuber. Isn't this shtick
getting a little old? I don't see how he is being suppressed, when I see him
give talks and lead symposiums at conferences all the time ...

> The most prestigious AI conference goes by the unfortunate acronym of NIPS,
> or Neural Information Processing Systems.

The name is likely getting changed this year.

~~~
zerostar07
To PNIS ?

~~~
majos
I've seen some people use NeurIPS.

------
xpuente
__“All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve
fitting,” __

------
8bitsrule
_Much of the AI community has decided to ignore Schmidhuber and hope he goes
away._

Just like computer history still forgets Konrad Zuse's 1941 Z3.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_\(computer\))

