6 ms·

I'll probably get flamed to death for saying this, but I like Jürgen. I mean, I don't know him in person (never met him) but I've seen a lot of his written work

I'll probably get flamed to death for saying this, but I like Jürgen. I mean, I don't know him in person (never met him) but I've seen a lot of his written work and interviews and what-not and he seems like an alright guy to me. Yes, I get it... there's that whole "ooooh, Jürgen is always trying to claim credit for everything" thing and all. But really, to me, it doesn't exactly come off that way. Note that he's often pointing out the lack of credit assigned even to people who lived and died centuries before him. His "shtick" to me isn't just about him saying "people didn't give me credit" but it seems more "AI people in general haven't credited the history of the field properly." And in many cases he seems to have a point.

noosphr 1y ago
It's a clash of cultures. He is an academic that cares for understanding where ideas came from. His detractors need to be the smartest people in the room to get paid millions and raise billions. It's not very sexy to say 'Oh yes, we are just using an old Soviet learning algorithm on better hardware. Turns out we would have lost the cold war if the USSR had access to a 5090.' , which won't get you the billions you need to build the supercomputers that push the state of the art today.
- ks2048 1y ago
  It seems his "detractors" (or at least his foes) are also academics - i.e. the same culture - they just cite Hinton and LeCun instead of Schmidhuber.
  - noosphr 1y ago
    It helps your career to cite the head of AI in Facebook and the former head of Google. Not so much some academician who worked in the 1970s in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan.
    - ks2048 1y ago
      I believe the Schmidhuber-ignoring (according to him) began before those two were at Google/Meta. But, I suppose NYU/Bell Labs and U-Toronto will be more likely to be cited than somewhere in Munich or Switzerland...
      - jll29 1y ago
        The location where scientists reside should be irrelevant - at best the venue where it was published should matter (I can understand that some obscure journals in other languages may be skipped in favor of more well-known (ACM/IEEE/ACL/...) English language conferences or journals), and it's not that Schmidhuber was hiding from the mainstream outlets. In the age of globalization, it's getting harder to justify ignoring anything out there.
godelski 1y ago
I think you sum up my feelings about him as well. He's a bit much sometimes but it's hard to deny that he's made monumental contributions to the field. It's also funny that we laugh at him when we also have a joke that in AI we just reinvent what people did in the 80's. He's just the person being more specific as to what and who. Ironically, I think the problem is we care too much about credit. It ends up getting hoarded rather than shared. We then just oversell our contributions because if you make the incremental improvements that literally everyone does, you get your works rejected for being incremental. I don't know what it is about CS specifically, but we have a culture problem or attribution and hype. From building on open source, it's libraries all the way down, but we act like we did it all alone. To jumping on bandwagons as if there's a right and immutable truth to how to do certain things, until the bubbles pop and we laugh at how stupid anyone was to do such a thing. Yet we don't contribute back to those projects that have US foundation, we laugh at "theory" which we stand on, and we listen to the same hype train people who got it wrong last time instead of turning to those who got it right. Why? It goes directly counter to the ideas of a group who love to claim rationalism, "working from first principles", and "I care what works"
- voidhorse 1y ago
  > we laugh at "theory" which we stand on This aspect of the industry really annoys me to no end. People in this field are so allergic to theory (which is ironic because CS, of all fields, is probably one of the ones in which theoretical investigations are most directly applicable) that they'll smugly proclaim their own intelligence and genius while showing you a pet implementation of ideas that have been around since the 70s or earlier. Sure, most of the time they implement it in a new context, but this leads to a fragmented language in which the same core ideas are implemented N times with everyone particular personal ignorant terminology choices (see for example, the wide array of names for basic functional data structure primitives like map, fold, etc. that abound across languages).
  - mindcrime 1y ago
    I get weird looks sometimes lately when I point out that "agents" are not a new thing, and that they date back at least to the 1980's and - depending on how you interpret certain things[1] - possibly back to the 1970's. People at work have, I think, gotten tired of my rant about how people who are ignorant of the history of their field have a tendency to either re-invent things that already exist, or to be snowed by other people who are re-inventing things that already exist. I suppose my own belief in the importance of understanding and acknowledging history is one reason I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to Schmidhuber's stance. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
bjornsing 1y ago
Yeah I have the same feeling. I also think it’s weird to say he’s clearly wrong. I mean, it’s a very subtle question exactly where you cross the line that comes with an obligation to credit others. All ideas build on each other and are to some extent mashups of ideas that came before them. It’s not something you can be clearly wrong about in an objective sense, and Jürgen’s view seems consistent. Looking at how credit and attribution works in science today (google ”citation rings” for example) I can honestly say that I’d much prefer to live in a world where Jürgen did invent most of AI, rather than the one we’re in now.
- jll29 1y ago
  > it’s a very subtle question exactly where you cross the line that comes with an obligation to credit others What he means is there are clusters that systematically avoid citing the true origins of important concepts related to computational learning, and prefer to only cite their own "cluster members", a phenomenon that in scientometrics is known as a citation cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_cartel
bhu8 1y ago
I'm Schmidhuber neutral, but the word on the street is that he is a major asshole and sometimes impossible to work with. His research might be more solid than the Turing award winners but his personality truly kept him behind.

noosphr 1y ago

It's a clash of cultures. He is an academic that cares for understanding where ideas came from. His detractors need to be the smartest people in the room to get paid millions and raise billions. It's not very sexy to say 'Oh yes, we are just using an old Soviet learning algorithm on better hardware. Turns out we would have lost the cold war if the USSR had access to a 5090.' , which won't get you the billions you need to build the supercomputers that push the state of the art today.

ks2048 1y ago
It seems his "detractors" (or at least his foes) are also academics - i.e. the same culture - they just cite Hinton and LeCun instead of Schmidhuber.
- noosphr 1y ago
  It helps your career to cite the head of AI in Facebook and the former head of Google. Not so much some academician who worked in the 1970s in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan.
  - ks2048 1y ago
    I believe the Schmidhuber-ignoring (according to him) began before those two were at Google/Meta. But, I suppose NYU/Bell Labs and U-Toronto will be more likely to be cited than somewhere in Munich or Switzerland...
    - jll29 1y ago
      The location where scientists reside should be irrelevant - at best the venue where it was published should matter (I can understand that some obscure journals in other languages may be skipped in favor of more well-known (ACM/IEEE/ACL/...) English language conferences or journals), and it's not that Schmidhuber was hiding from the mainstream outlets. In the age of globalization, it's getting harder to justify ignoring anything out there.

godelski 1y ago

I think you sum up my feelings about him as well. He's a bit much sometimes but it's hard to deny that he's made monumental contributions to the field. It's also funny that we laugh at him when we also have a joke that in AI we just reinvent what people did in the 80's. He's just the person being more specific as to what and who. Ironically, I think the problem is we care too much about credit. It ends up getting hoarded rather than shared. We then just oversell our contributions because if you make the incremental improvements that literally everyone does, you get your works rejected for being incremental. I don't know what it is about CS specifically, but we have a culture problem or attribution and hype. From building on open source, it's libraries all the way down, but we act like we did it all alone. To jumping on bandwagons as if there's a right and immutable truth to how to do certain things, until the bubbles pop and we laugh at how stupid anyone was to do such a thing. Yet we don't contribute back to those projects that have US foundation, we laugh at "theory" which we stand on, and we listen to the same hype train people who got it wrong last time instead of turning to those who got it right. Why? It goes directly counter to the ideas of a group who love to claim rationalism, "working from first principles", and "I care what works"

voidhorse 1y ago
> we laugh at "theory" which we stand on This aspect of the industry really annoys me to no end. People in this field are so allergic to theory (which is ironic because CS, of all fields, is probably one of the ones in which theoretical investigations are most directly applicable) that they'll smugly proclaim their own intelligence and genius while showing you a pet implementation of ideas that have been around since the 70s or earlier. Sure, most of the time they implement it in a new context, but this leads to a fragmented language in which the same core ideas are implemented N times with everyone particular personal ignorant terminology choices (see for example, the wide array of names for basic functional data structure primitives like map, fold, etc. that abound across languages).
- mindcrime 1y ago
  I get weird looks sometimes lately when I point out that "agents" are not a new thing, and that they date back at least to the 1980's and - depending on how you interpret certain things[1] - possibly back to the 1970's. People at work have, I think, gotten tired of my rant about how people who are ignorant of the history of their field have a tendency to either re-invent things that already exist, or to be snowed by other people who are re-inventing things that already exist. I suppose my own belief in the importance of understanding and acknowledging history is one reason I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to Schmidhuber's stance. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

bjornsing 1y ago

Yeah I have the same feeling. I also think it’s weird to say he’s clearly wrong. I mean, it’s a very subtle question exactly where you cross the line that comes with an obligation to credit others. All ideas build on each other and are to some extent mashups of ideas that came before them. It’s not something you can be clearly wrong about in an objective sense, and Jürgen’s view seems consistent. Looking at how credit and attribution works in science today (google ”citation rings” for example) I can honestly say that I’d much prefer to live in a world where Jürgen did invent most of AI, rather than the one we’re in now.

jll29 1y ago
> it’s a very subtle question exactly where you cross the line that comes with an obligation to credit others What he means is there are clusters that systematically avoid citing the true origins of important concepts related to computational learning, and prefer to only cite their own "cluster members", a phenomenon that in scientometrics is known as a citation cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_cartel

bhu8 1y ago

I'm Schmidhuber neutral, but the word on the street is that he is a major asshole and sometimes impossible to work with. His research might be more solid than the Turing award winners but his personality truly kept him behind.