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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 ge
by 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 agoIt 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 agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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.