16 ms·

LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence does not cite prior work

164 points by hardmaru 4y ago

hardmaru 4y ago
The title of the article is "LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence rehashes but does not cite essential work of 1990-2015" but had to be shortened to fit the character limit of Hacker News titles.
samwestdev 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- t6jvcereio 4y ago
  Yikes. What's the gossip?
- dang 4y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a fair bit and we ban that sort of account. I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted some good things, but we need you to stick to the rules when posting here. We want curious, thoughtful conversation. If you don't have anything of that sort to say, your options are to (1) find a different topic you do have something curious and thoughtful to say about, or (2) not to post anything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
going_ham 4y ago
It's him again. That must be enough to give context on who I am talking about. I do not know what to tell about him. Sure he has explored a lot of topic and never got the limelight like others. But I think it's time for him to stop gaslighting about other researchers just because they didn't cite his papers. Sure, they could have never read it. He can make his work shout by publishing better papers and better design. He could have written the article before too. But why did he write it only after LeCunn wrote it? I am sorry I haven't read the article because it's him again. Edit: After glossing through it, it seems he is doing the same thing that he did with GAN.
- peter_l_downs 4y ago
  If anyone is looking for more background: it's Jürgen Schmidhuber. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496
- arcanus 4y ago
  We are scientists and can use names. 'him' is Jürgen Schmidhuber. He's a luminary of ML, but he has entered into several attribution controversies. He famously accused Ian Goodfellow of appropriating his work to create generative adversarial networks (GANs) in a public venue (a NeurIPS workshop). I agree with the parent comment. Ultimately, Science is about advancing the human condition more than celebrating great individuals. While I'm sympathetic to Schmidhuber's feelings he isn't given sufficient credit, he's still an internationally recognized, fully tenured professor.
  - domenicrosati 4y ago
    Well said. Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read. Heck even when something is similar you may not cite it since it's so old the relevance is no longer there for a working research paper. I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming? If someone has a similar idea to mine I'd celebrate them, seek to collaborate and encourage. Wouldn't that mean your research program is getting advanced for free! Heck you should thank them for doing your work for you.
    - logicchains 4y ago
      >Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read. It's not like Schmidhuber's papers are obscure. >I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming You're engaging in toxic victim-shaming. What, you expect him to just bend over and accept people stealing his ideas without giving him credit? Fundamentally the researchers who stole from him were engaging in unethical behaviour and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that without consequence.
potatototoo99 4y ago
LeCun being LeCun.
- dang 4y ago
  Personal attacks aren't allowed here, and please don't post unsubstantive comments generally. We're trying for a different sort of discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
m00dy 4y ago
LeCunT
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016347.
workingon 4y ago
Who cares my shit doesn’t get cited all the time but I don’t blog about it like a bitch.
- dang 4y ago
  Posting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
seydor 4y ago
Lecun's post is not even a paper as stated in the foreward of the paper. But thanks for bringing it up, i will read it > This document is not a technical nor scholarly paper in the traditional sense, but a position paper expressing my vision for a path towards intelligent machines that learn more like animals and humans, that can reason and plan, and whose behavior is driven by intrinsic objectives, rather than by hard-wired programs, external supervision, or external rewards. Many ideas described in this paper (almost all of them) have been formulated by many authors in various contexts in various form. The present piece does not claim priority for any of them but presents a proposal for how to assemble them into a consistent whole. In particular, the piece pinpoints the challenges ahead. It also lists a number of avenues that are likely or unlikely to succeed.
- swayvil 4y ago
  "intrinsic objectives" and "hard-wired programs" sound alike. Given that both must be designed.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Meaning with defined goals (intrinsic objectives) instead of defined operations (hard-wired programs).
    - swayvil 4y ago
      A defined goal is just a defined operation with more steps. It's inescapable.
    - vannevar 4y ago
      Once you've committed to performing an operation it becomes a goal. As the old saying goes, it's turtles all the way down...
      - swayvil 4y ago
        Which makes us living creatures look rather different from machines. Not to get religious about it.
alphabetting 4y ago
background from the great Genius Makers history of ML: The press needed heroes for its AI narrative. It chose Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and sometimes Ng, thanks largely to the promotional efforts of Google and Facebook. The narrative did not extend to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the German researcher based on Lake Lugano who carried the torch for neural networks in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s. Some took issue with Schmidhuber's exclusion, including Schmidhuber. In 2005, he and Alex Graves, the researcher who later joined DeepMind, had published a paper describing a speech recognition system based on LSTMs-neural networks with short-term memory. "This is that crazy Schmidhuber stuff," Hinton had told himself, "but it actually works." Now the technology was powering speech services at companies like Google and Microsoft, and Schmidhuber wanted his due. After Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio published a paper on the rise of deep learning in Nature, he wrote a critique arguing that "the Canadians" weren't as influential as they influence would soon reverberate across the industry-Schmidhuber stood up in the audience and chastised him for not citing similar work in Switzerland from the 1990s. He did this kind of thing so often, it became its own verb-as in: "You have been Schmidhubered."
- nabla9 4y ago
  Reading some Schmidhuber's writings on this issue is a great way to learn the history and development of AI and ANN's that is often missed. At the same time Schmidhuber's tone and anal-retentive attitude explains why he is considered so annoying. The field is full of huge egos and overly simplified narratives from a singular point of view. For example, it's true that Hinton was a torchbearer of neural networks for several decades and was off mainstream. That gives him well earned legendary status. But it's also true that other methods worked better until early or mid 2000s and had more rigorous theory behind it (theory behind older methods is still better, nn is still mostly experimenting and wandering). Hinton also had position and funding to do pioneering research and collect students all over the world. I remember reading his product of experts paper as a student in 2002 when I worked with boosting and bagging, so clearly he was not completely out of sight.
  - fxtentacle 4y ago
    I believe it's reasonable for him to request a citation if significant results of his works are quoted. LeCun would probably also be upset if he read about his work in the newspaper, but mis-attributed to someone else. Also, millions in funding money depend on stuff like this. If LeCun can pretend to be the inventor, he gets the grant money. If Schmidhuber gets the citation he seeks, he can use that to apply for new funding. So it's not just prestige, these citation issues have a large monetary impact, too.
T-A 4y ago
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmidhubered https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmidhubere...
Gatsky 4y ago
So this is a universal thing in science, nothing new under the sun etc. What’s changed is that things move faster these days, so the originator isn’t dead yet when you rediscover whatever they came up with.
medymed 4y ago
There are 7 pages of citations. Not every somewhat related thought anyone has ever had or published will be cited. But incidentally, it is nerdily interesting to think of the bibliography section as a place to display contempt by omission that is subtle to most but glaring to few.
carapace 4y ago
I recall watching a video of Schmidhuber presenting. He comes onstage, introduces himself, and then makes a joke. ("You again!") It's a funny joke. And it's self-deprecating. I remember thinking to myself, "This is a formidable Austrian." That and the Gödelmachine: I'm a fan. There's a simple and obvious way to solve this: cite the papers. It's traditional, it's noble, it's not hard, and it makes you look good. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago something I learned reading an old interview by Bill Moyers of Isaac Asimov, that in ~1900 three different people, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, discovered the laws of genetics, checked the literature, and found the work of Mendel from half a century earlier. Each of them credited Mendel.
- angrais 4y ago
  You do not have to cite every paper under a specific topic nor do you have to cite the first paper that introduces a paper. Why? Maybe those papers are not well written. Maybe a recent paper covers the idea better, etc. So no, he does not have to be cited just because.
  - carapace 4y ago
    > You do not have to cite every paper under a specific topic Strawman. > nor do you have to cite the first paper that introduces a paper. Did you mean "first paper that introduces a concept."? In any event, also a strawman. > Maybe those papers are not well written. Hypothetical. (Have you read the papers? I've read some and I would say they are well-written.) > Maybe a recent paper covers the idea better, etc. Wonderful! Should still cite prior work. > So no, he does not have to be cited just because. Strawman. If you're going to argue at least do it well. The options are: cite him, slight him, or prove him wrong. I think he's made it clear that he won't accepts slights without a fight, so one can either show him where he's wrong, cite him as he plainly makes clear one should, or admit that he's being shut out for unscientific reasons.
    - angrais 4y ago
      I'm not sure you know what Strawman means. Are you a researcher? Have you published research papers? >> The options are: cite him, slight him, or prove him wrong. Again, are you a researcher? These are not the options. Also what even is "slight him" or "prove him wrong"? My comments above are about citation practices not this one researcher in particular. >> I think he's made it clear that he won't accepts slights without a fight, so one can either show him where he's wrong, cite him as he plainly makes clear one should, or admit that he's being shut out for unscientific reasons. There is nothing to fight about nor nothing to "prove". There are many reasons to cite an author and being the first to publish a paper many years ago about a topic does not automatically deem citation. That's not how science works. It's how (unfortunately) the academic churn of paper writing works at times. FYI: it's not "unscientific" to not cite a paper. It's almost impossible to cite all relevant works, so the author of a paper selects the most relevant. Obviously this is biased and can become political (e.g., Schmidhuber), but flamming online about not being cited doesn't mean you must cite an author.
harveywi 4y ago
lecuna (noun): An empty space in a list of citations where the works of Jürgen Schmidhuber should appear.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  This is somewhat funny and very smart and can only be downvoted by people who don’t speak fluent Latin.
  - jfim 4y ago
    For those who never had a Latin class, could you explain the joke? Thanks!
    - harveywi 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacuna_(manuscripts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacuna_(manuscripts)
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Lacuna is in proper English too though
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  Very clever.
snickmy 4y ago
elteto 4y ago
It is important to note that, as of right now, the paper is full of citations and references, including to Schmidhuber [0]. [0] https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf
jollybean 4y ago
How can there not seem to be a kind of consensus around this? There were tons of citations, why does a simple idea written down need to cite work from 20 years ago? The threshold of tolerance here is basically ridiculous, authors will be more predisposed to research and citations than to actual thinking. I suggest if someone feels left out, they can make a claim and the paper can be 'amended or not' and that's that. How on earth is someone supposed to have an 'idea' without a team of grad students ...
whoisjuan 4y ago
That's because it really isn't an academic paper. He clearly stated that he was publishing it as a manifesto of what he would be researching going forward. Would it be different if he just published it on a Medium or Substack blog? I'm not an academic so I don't understand these weird feuds but seems pretty ridiculous to call someone out for lack of citations when they clearly disclosed the nature of that writing as somewhat unofficial and opinion-based. Maybe there's something I don't understand about those academic circles.
- nr2x 4y ago
  There is a giant leaderboard called “citation count”. You get a real time “score” that can define your career prospects. So, like any system with a “score”, people become warped, they focus on the score above all else. So this person thinks they aren’t getting their magical citation “points” and are mad. Nobody owns ideas and very few ideas are original, or much more important, timely. If anybody is getting screwed it’s the science fiction authors!
dang 4y ago
Uh oh. Jürgen Schmidhuber's Home Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250395 - Feb 2022 (8 comments) Turing Oversold? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522761 - Sept 2021 (303 comments) Schmidhuber: The most cited neural networks all build on work done in my labs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28465943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28465943 - Sept 2021 (1 comment) 1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974 - June 2021 (296 comments) Who Invented Backpropagation? (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127611 - May 2021 (1 comment) Critique of 2018 Turing Award for Drs. Bengio and Hinton and LeCun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496 - April 2021 (20 comments) Verifying Schmidhuber's Critique of Turing Award for Bengio and Hinton and LeCun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23649542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23649542 - June 2020 (7 comments) Critique of 2018 Turing Award for Drs. Bengio and Hinton and LeCun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642335 - June 2020 (1 comment) Schmidhuber: Critique of Honda Prize for Dr. Hinton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932838 - April 2020 (1 comment) Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166852 - Oct 2019 (34 comments - tlb has a nice take in the top comment there) Lecun.ml Redirects to Schmidhuber's Website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884691 - May 2019 (1 comment) Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499515 - March 2019 (146 comments) Jürgen Schmidhuber on Consciousness (AMA on Reddit, 2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241278 - Feb 2019 (3 comments) Jürgen Schmidhuber says he’ll make machines smarter than us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17100132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17100132 - May 2018 (26 comments) This Man Is the Godfather the AI Community Wants to Forget - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17089607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17089607 - May 2018 (1 comment) This Man Is the Godfather the AI Community Wants to Forget - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073202 - May 2018 (1 comment) Deep Learning Conspiracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962938 - April 2018 (1 comment) A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094373 - April 2017 (73 comments) AI Pioneer Wants to Build the Renaissance Machine of the Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412050 - Jan 2017 (28 comments) Jürgen Schmidhuber: The Problems of AI Consciousness Is Already Solved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316530 - Jan 2017 (1 comment) When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066646 - Nov 2016 (50 comments) When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056794 - Nov 2016 (2 comments) Ye LeCun replies back to Juergen Schmidhuber blog post #DeepLearningDrama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824660 - July 2015 (3 comments) Critique of Paper by “Deep Learning Conspiracy” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9807326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9807326 - June 2015 (33 comments) Deep Learning Talk by Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694270 - May 2014 (1 comment)

164 points by hardmaru 4y ago

The title of the article is "LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence rehashes but does not cite essential work of 1990-2015" but had to be shortened to fit the character limit of Hacker News titles.

samwestdev 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
t6jvcereio 4y ago
Yikes. What's the gossip?
dang 4y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a fair bit and we ban that sort of account. I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted some good things, but we need you to stick to the rules when posting here. We want curious, thoughtful conversation. If you don't have anything of that sort to say, your options are to (1) find a different topic you do have something curious and thoughtful to say about, or (2) not to post anything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

going_ham 4y ago

It's him again. That must be enough to give context on who I am talking about. I do not know what to tell about him. Sure he has explored a lot of topic and never got the limelight like others. But I think it's time for him to stop gaslighting about other researchers just because they didn't cite his papers. Sure, they could have never read it. He can make his work shout by publishing better papers and better design. He could have written the article before too. But why did he write it only after LeCunn wrote it? I am sorry I haven't read the article because it's him again. Edit: After glossing through it, it seems he is doing the same thing that he did with GAN.

peter_l_downs 4y ago
If anyone is looking for more background: it's Jürgen Schmidhuber. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496
arcanus 4y ago
We are scientists and can use names. 'him' is Jürgen Schmidhuber. He's a luminary of ML, but he has entered into several attribution controversies. He famously accused Ian Goodfellow of appropriating his work to create generative adversarial networks (GANs) in a public venue (a NeurIPS workshop). I agree with the parent comment. Ultimately, Science is about advancing the human condition more than celebrating great individuals. While I'm sympathetic to Schmidhuber's feelings he isn't given sufficient credit, he's still an internationally recognized, fully tenured professor.
- domenicrosati 4y ago
  Well said. Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read. Heck even when something is similar you may not cite it since it's so old the relevance is no longer there for a working research paper. I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming? If someone has a similar idea to mine I'd celebrate them, seek to collaborate and encourage. Wouldn't that mean your research program is getting advanced for free! Heck you should thank them for doing your work for you.
  - logicchains 4y ago
    >Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read. It's not like Schmidhuber's papers are obscure. >I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming You're engaging in toxic victim-shaming. What, you expect him to just bend over and accept people stealing his ideas without giving him credit? Fundamentally the researchers who stole from him were engaging in unethical behaviour and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that without consequence.

potatototoo99 4y ago

LeCun being LeCun.

dang 4y ago
Personal attacks aren't allowed here, and please don't post unsubstantive comments generally. We're trying for a different sort of discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

m00dy 4y ago

LeCunT

dang 4y ago
We've banned this account. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016347.

workingon 4y ago

Who cares my shit doesn’t get cited all the time but I don’t blog about it like a bitch.

dang 4y ago
Posting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

seydor 4y ago

Lecun's post is not even a paper as stated in the foreward of the paper. But thanks for bringing it up, i will read it > This document is not a technical nor scholarly paper in the traditional sense, but a position paper expressing my vision for a path towards intelligent machines that learn more like animals and humans, that can reason and plan, and whose behavior is driven by intrinsic objectives, rather than by hard-wired programs, external supervision, or external rewards. Many ideas described in this paper (almost all of them) have been formulated by many authors in various contexts in various form. The present piece does not claim priority for any of them but presents a proposal for how to assemble them into a consistent whole. In particular, the piece pinpoints the challenges ahead. It also lists a number of avenues that are likely or unlikely to succeed.

swayvil 4y ago
"intrinsic objectives" and "hard-wired programs" sound alike. Given that both must be designed.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Meaning with defined goals (intrinsic objectives) instead of defined operations (hard-wired programs).
  - swayvil 4y ago
    A defined goal is just a defined operation with more steps. It's inescapable.
  - vannevar 4y ago
    Once you've committed to performing an operation it becomes a goal. As the old saying goes, it's turtles all the way down...
    - swayvil 4y ago
      Which makes us living creatures look rather different from machines. Not to get religious about it.

alphabetting 4y ago

background from the great Genius Makers history of ML: The press needed heroes for its AI narrative. It chose Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and sometimes Ng, thanks largely to the promotional efforts of Google and Facebook. The narrative did not extend to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the German researcher based on Lake Lugano who carried the torch for neural networks in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s. Some took issue with Schmidhuber's exclusion, including Schmidhuber. In 2005, he and Alex Graves, the researcher who later joined DeepMind, had published a paper describing a speech recognition system based on LSTMs-neural networks with short-term memory. "This is that crazy Schmidhuber stuff," Hinton had told himself, "but it actually works." Now the technology was powering speech services at companies like Google and Microsoft, and Schmidhuber wanted his due. After Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio published a paper on the rise of deep learning in Nature, he wrote a critique arguing that "the Canadians" weren't as influential as they influence would soon reverberate across the industry-Schmidhuber stood up in the audience and chastised him for not citing similar work in Switzerland from the 1990s. He did this kind of thing so often, it became its own verb-as in: "You have been Schmidhubered."

nabla9 4y ago
Reading some Schmidhuber's writings on this issue is a great way to learn the history and development of AI and ANN's that is often missed. At the same time Schmidhuber's tone and anal-retentive attitude explains why he is considered so annoying. The field is full of huge egos and overly simplified narratives from a singular point of view. For example, it's true that Hinton was a torchbearer of neural networks for several decades and was off mainstream. That gives him well earned legendary status. But it's also true that other methods worked better until early or mid 2000s and had more rigorous theory behind it (theory behind older methods is still better, nn is still mostly experimenting and wandering). Hinton also had position and funding to do pioneering research and collect students all over the world. I remember reading his product of experts paper as a student in 2002 when I worked with boosting and bagging, so clearly he was not completely out of sight.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  I believe it's reasonable for him to request a citation if significant results of his works are quoted. LeCun would probably also be upset if he read about his work in the newspaper, but mis-attributed to someone else. Also, millions in funding money depend on stuff like this. If LeCun can pretend to be the inventor, he gets the grant money. If Schmidhuber gets the citation he seeks, he can use that to apply for new funding. So it's not just prestige, these citation issues have a large monetary impact, too.

T-A 4y ago

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmidhubered https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmidhubere...

Gatsky 4y ago

So this is a universal thing in science, nothing new under the sun etc. What’s changed is that things move faster these days, so the originator isn’t dead yet when you rediscover whatever they came up with.

medymed 4y ago

There are 7 pages of citations. Not every somewhat related thought anyone has ever had or published will be cited. But incidentally, it is nerdily interesting to think of the bibliography section as a place to display contempt by omission that is subtle to most but glaring to few.

carapace 4y ago

I recall watching a video of Schmidhuber presenting. He comes onstage, introduces himself, and then makes a joke. ("You again!") It's a funny joke. And it's self-deprecating. I remember thinking to myself, "This is a formidable Austrian." That and the Gödelmachine: I'm a fan. There's a simple and obvious way to solve this: cite the papers. It's traditional, it's noble, it's not hard, and it makes you look good. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago something I learned reading an old interview by Bill Moyers of Isaac Asimov, that in ~1900 three different people, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, discovered the laws of genetics, checked the literature, and found the work of Mendel from half a century earlier. Each of them credited Mendel.

angrais 4y ago
You do not have to cite every paper under a specific topic nor do you have to cite the first paper that introduces a paper. Why? Maybe those papers are not well written. Maybe a recent paper covers the idea better, etc. So no, he does not have to be cited just because.
- carapace 4y ago
  > You do not have to cite every paper under a specific topic Strawman. > nor do you have to cite the first paper that introduces a paper. Did you mean "first paper that introduces a concept."? In any event, also a strawman. > Maybe those papers are not well written. Hypothetical. (Have you read the papers? I've read some and I would say they are well-written.) > Maybe a recent paper covers the idea better, etc. Wonderful! Should still cite prior work. > So no, he does not have to be cited just because. Strawman. If you're going to argue at least do it well. The options are: cite him, slight him, or prove him wrong. I think he's made it clear that he won't accepts slights without a fight, so one can either show him where he's wrong, cite him as he plainly makes clear one should, or admit that he's being shut out for unscientific reasons.
  - angrais 4y ago
    I'm not sure you know what Strawman means. Are you a researcher? Have you published research papers? >> The options are: cite him, slight him, or prove him wrong. Again, are you a researcher? These are not the options. Also what even is "slight him" or "prove him wrong"? My comments above are about citation practices not this one researcher in particular. >> I think he's made it clear that he won't accepts slights without a fight, so one can either show him where he's wrong, cite him as he plainly makes clear one should, or admit that he's being shut out for unscientific reasons. There is nothing to fight about nor nothing to "prove". There are many reasons to cite an author and being the first to publish a paper many years ago about a topic does not automatically deem citation. That's not how science works. It's how (unfortunately) the academic churn of paper writing works at times. FYI: it's not "unscientific" to not cite a paper. It's almost impossible to cite all relevant works, so the author of a paper selects the most relevant. Obviously this is biased and can become political (e.g., Schmidhuber), but flamming online about not being cited doesn't mean you must cite an author.

harveywi 4y ago

lecuna (noun): An empty space in a list of citations where the works of Jürgen Schmidhuber should appear.

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
This is somewhat funny and very smart and can only be downvoted by people who don’t speak fluent Latin.
- jfim 4y ago
  For those who never had a Latin class, could you explain the joke? Thanks!
  - harveywi 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacuna_(manuscripts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacuna_(manuscripts)
- googlryas 4y ago
  Lacuna is in proper English too though
mechanical_bear 4y ago
Very clever.

snickmy 4y ago

elteto 4y ago

It is important to note that, as of right now, the paper is full of citations and references, including to Schmidhuber [0]. [0] https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

jollybean 4y ago

How can there not seem to be a kind of consensus around this? There were tons of citations, why does a simple idea written down need to cite work from 20 years ago? The threshold of tolerance here is basically ridiculous, authors will be more predisposed to research and citations than to actual thinking. I suggest if someone feels left out, they can make a claim and the paper can be 'amended or not' and that's that. How on earth is someone supposed to have an 'idea' without a team of grad students ...

whoisjuan 4y ago

That's because it really isn't an academic paper. He clearly stated that he was publishing it as a manifesto of what he would be researching going forward. Would it be different if he just published it on a Medium or Substack blog? I'm not an academic so I don't understand these weird feuds but seems pretty ridiculous to call someone out for lack of citations when they clearly disclosed the nature of that writing as somewhat unofficial and opinion-based. Maybe there's something I don't understand about those academic circles.

nr2x 4y ago
There is a giant leaderboard called “citation count”. You get a real time “score” that can define your career prospects. So, like any system with a “score”, people become warped, they focus on the score above all else. So this person thinks they aren’t getting their magical citation “points” and are mad. Nobody owns ideas and very few ideas are original, or much more important, timely. If anybody is getting screwed it’s the science fiction authors!

dang 4y ago

Uh oh. Jürgen Schmidhuber's Home Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250395 - Feb 2022 (8 comments) Turing Oversold? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522761 - Sept 2021 (303 comments) Schmidhuber: The most cited neural networks all build on work done in my labs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28465943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28465943 - Sept 2021 (1 comment) 1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974 - June 2021 (296 comments) Who Invented Backpropagation? (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127611 - May 2021 (1 comment) Critique of 2018 Turing Award for Drs. Bengio and Hinton and LeCun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496 - April 2021 (20 comments) Verifying Schmidhuber's Critique of Turing Award for Bengio and Hinton and LeCun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23649542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23649542 - June 2020 (7 comments) Critique of 2018 Turing Award for Drs. Bengio and Hinton and LeCun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642335 - June 2020 (1 comment) Schmidhuber: Critique of Honda Prize for Dr. Hinton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932838 - April 2020 (1 comment) Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21166852 - Oct 2019 (34 comments - tlb has a nice take in the top comment there) Lecun.ml Redirects to Schmidhuber's Website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884691 - May 2019 (1 comment) Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499515 - March 2019 (146 comments) Jürgen Schmidhuber on Consciousness (AMA on Reddit, 2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241278 - Feb 2019 (3 comments) Jürgen Schmidhuber says he’ll make machines smarter than us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17100132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17100132 - May 2018 (26 comments) This Man Is the Godfather the AI Community Wants to Forget - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17089607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17089607 - May 2018 (1 comment) This Man Is the Godfather the AI Community Wants to Forget - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073202 - May 2018 (1 comment) Deep Learning Conspiracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962938 - April 2018 (1 comment) A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094373 - April 2017 (73 comments) AI Pioneer Wants to Build the Renaissance Machine of the Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412050 - Jan 2017 (28 comments) Jürgen Schmidhuber: The Problems of AI Consciousness Is Already Solved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316530 - Jan 2017 (1 comment) When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066646 - Nov 2016 (50 comments) When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056794 - Nov 2016 (2 comments) Ye LeCun replies back to Juergen Schmidhuber blog post #DeepLearningDrama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824660 - July 2015 (3 comments) Critique of Paper by “Deep Learning Conspiracy” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9807326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9807326 - June 2015 (33 comments) Deep Learning Talk by Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694270 - May 2014 (1 comment)