
When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’ - bcaulfield
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html?hpw&rref=technology&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
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Teodolfo
Jürgen maintains a lot of sock-puppet accounts (even on wikipedia and amazon
reviews). Let's see if any of them show up in this thread. He is a perfectly
good researcher and his students have done a lot of excellent work, but I
don't approve of his choices to use an army of sock-puppets or his (I will try
to put this charitably) somewhat non-standard ideas on how academic credit
should be apportioned.

~~~
robotresearcher
But you're cool with anonymously posting a public accusation of unprofessional
behaviour without supporting evidence?

(edit: apparently people are cool with this. That's weird. I'm not claiming
the parent is untrue, it's just that you shouldn't talk smack about people in
public without presenting evidence if you don't use your real name.)

~~~
nitrogen
_if you don 't use your real name_

From what does the supposed requirement to use one's real name derive?

~~~
kevinskii
It's not a requirement. It's common decency. Accusing someone of sockpuppetry
is no different than calling him a liar. Doing it from behind a pseudonym
without offering any evidence is irresponsible and cowardly, as it gives that
person no way to defend his reputation.

~~~
aoeu345
No one's reputation is at stake with internet comments from anonymous posters.

The internet is protected from the forces that threaten physical forums where
each voice is a real person. You cannot pay off the internet to talk nice
about you, and you can't follow anon home and beat him up for speaking
negatively. It sounds like Jurgen has accumulated some bad karma on the
internet; this is not baseless accusation as much as it is keeping ourselves
at a healthy level of skepticism regarding someone who has already lost our
trust. The cowards with loud, strawman accusations are usually appropriately
downvoted when their criticisms _are_ out of place.

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apas
I was fortunate enough to attend his talks at MIT CSAIL while working there.

Here are some notes in case anyone's interested -- [0] and [1]. I also
recommend his TEDx talk.

[0] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6bbktuywoqv2w3/jurgen-talk-
notes....](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6bbktuywoqv2w3/jurgen-talk-
notes.pdf?dl=0)

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/ux53ism7fsxgo8x/jurgen-csail-
talk2...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ux53ism7fsxgo8x/jurgen-csail-
talk2.pdf?dl=0)

------
nothis
Always getting skeptical when you hear of a name before you hear of a concrete
achievement. I can respect his research but a bit too much Jürgen Schmidhuber
before even getting into what his contributions are.

~~~
joggery
>hear of a name before you hear of a concrete achievement

That's an excellent criterion.

I often wonder if many famous _past_ intellectuals were mere celebrities where
I can't recall a single achievement. And if one can't name a famous true idea
in an current academic field, perhaps the field itself is worthless.

~~~
BickNowstrom
It is a poor criterion, because it is so subjective and dependent on PR
machines.

The OP just has not heard of any accomplishments, but anyone with a little
expertise in deep (reinforcement) learning knows about the major contributions
to the field by Schmidhuber.

Using this criterion you are using popular media and fields you know not much
about, to brush away the accomplishments of respectable scientists. Don't base
your skepticism on your own lack of knowledge: that makes it selective -- You
can not cut through the bullshit, if you don't know how to wield a sword.

~~~
joggery
The criterion is not about assessing a particular individual's contributions,
it's about choosing what and whom to investigate in the first place. Of course
this is subjective, and rightly so.

------
rl3
> _Dr. Schmidhuber also has a grand vision for A.I. — that self-aware or
> “conscious machines” are just around the corner — that causes eyes to roll
> among some of his peers._

I can't help but wonder if the sole reason AGI doesn't exist is because it
hasn't been figured out yet.

While that statement sounds obvious on the face of it, the implication is that
we may already possess both the sufficient computational resources and human
intelligence to realize its creation.

~~~
oh_sigh
It doesn't really tell us much. There is no reason ancient Athens or Taixue or
Gundishapur couldn't have developed calculus or Newtonian physics. No resource
was limiting them in the development, but those fields weren't developed until
1600+ years later.

~~~
bcaulfield
Archimedes was close... [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-
archimedes](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes)

~~~
NotUsingLinux
That is so cool...

------
bradneuberg
Jürgen Schmidhuber is an early neural net pioneer, especially with regards to
making recurrent neural nets a reality. As others have mentioned he was
instrumental with LSTMs, but also advised Alex Graves on his work with
Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) that were instrumental in allowing
neural nets to be used for speech recognition.

------
Animats
He was too early. People have been futzing around with neural nets since the
1950s. We can now make them work, but the training process requires huge
amounts of compute power to do a huge number of iterations making tiny changes
on each cycle. This has only been feasible in the last few years.

~~~
dekhn
you're missing the importance of techniques that allow backprop along very
deep nets. that's related to, but distinct from, the amount of computation
required to train a model.

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tunnuz
Seriously check out Schmidhuber's work
([http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen)), from his
website:"Since age 15 or so, the main goal of professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has
been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than
himself, then retire.".

~~~
bcaulfield
A remarkably inefficient plan to be lazy.

~~~
nabla9
Never underestimate the power of being lazy. Power steering wasn't invented by
an exercise freak.

~~~
daveguy
Actually it was invented by an exercise freak. Francis Davis was a marathon
runner in the 20's around the same time he invented power steering.

~~~
TrevorJ
This is why I love hacker news.

------
DigPhysics
I think Juergen is an interesting and intelligent guy. Besides his work on RNN
architecture, he also holds a belief that it is possible that a short computer
program has generated our universe.

I think it would be interesting for him to talk about the relationship between
his belief that a deterministic universe theory is possible, with his practice
of using statistical learning algorithms. Some people might view ANNs
(including RNNs) as good learning algorithms for sorting out statistical
patterns of probabilistic systems, but not as helpful for analyzing
deterministic systems. But I think there is some good insight to be had from
exploring the value of statistical learning algorithms on deterministic
systems.

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somerandomness
Unlikely

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Yeah as an easter egg.

Seriously though, what title will it bestow on Wolfram?

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partycoder
The tone of the article title reminds me of the posts of the Mindpixel guy,
who also claimed to have been developing strong AI but turned out to be a
person with severe mental illnesses...

This is not a good article please don't upvote it.

If you think LTSM is interesting, I am 100% with you... but there must be for
sure much better articles about LTSM or the author himself that you can pick
from to share here.

This article doesn't add a lot of value, takes a lot of effort to make it's
point and feels like a huge waste of time when you finish reading it.

~~~
obmelvin
Your post doesn't make sense - how is that related to this? Why is not up
voting this article being a good HN user?

