Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

Like half of what Schmidhuber is always complaining about is that (except for LSTMs) people aren't standing on the shoulders of his research very much. They try to solve some of the same problems people have always wanted to solve, try some of the same approaches people always tend to try, and then tinker until it works. At no point do they consult Schmidhuber's decade-old papers where he tried something kind of similar but didn't get very impressive results, and hence they also do not think to cite him. Then he comes out of the woodwork to assert priority.

Where is "this crowd" that you are talking about?

The closest to that that I've seen is that traditional academia approaches are too far removed from practical applications for highly applied fields like software engineering, or too slow for fast-moving fields like modern day ML (thus, all the preprints).

I think most of criticism of academia is about the rampant fraud and unreproducible results, due to the way the incentives are structured.

This is a straw-man if I ever saw one.

Practically no one is against hard science research, properly conducted. The issues are rampant fraud / p-hacking / unreproducible garbage mixed with an unhealthy dose of ideological monoculture and indoctrination, garnished with rising tuition prices while sitting on huge endowments in case of the Ivy Leagues.

It's sad that he is the only one speaking out about Hinton. This whole Hinton glorification seems like it's being pushed by an agenda. I'm not sure if he would receive this much attention if he held a different view (closer to LeCun or Ng), rather than these Effective Altruism takes on current AI.

Not that surprising since the whole LLM ecosystem is based on plagiarism.

Hinton did not invent backpropagation.

related paragraph from Wikipedia:

Modern backpropagation was first published by Seppo Linnainmaa as "reverse mode of automatic differentiation" (1970)[26] for discrete connected networks of nested differentiable functions.[27][28][29]

In 1982, Paul Werbos applied backpropagation to MLPs in the way that has become standard.

That's what bugs me about him. So much work has gone into today's models that calling his contributions "the root" isn't really warranted. He's always complaining that Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio get more credit than they deserve, and now he's over-claiming himself.

Surely the roots go back to Turing, Gödel, Hilbert, Frege, Leibniz, Aristoteles.