As someone who was heavily involved in AI research in the 1990s, of a Schmidhuber flavored variety though I’ve never interacted with him, I do think there is so

As someone who was heavily involved in AI research in the 1990s, of a Schmidhuber flavored variety though I’ve never interacted with him, I do think there is some underlying truth to his general point. Most of the current theory isn’t actually new and at least some people should know better that are kind of pretending it was invented out of whole cloth recently. But at the time a lot of this was invented, the hardware simply wasn’t capable enough to reduce it to practice — it is why I got out — and a lot of people who are piling into the field are simultaneously disinterested in that history and claiming every idea that crosses their mind as a novel invention. This is not unique to AI. Many other subfields of computer science have a similar dynamic e.g. databases. I’ve seen people claiming novelty in ideas that were fully proven out in real systems in the 1970s (and abandoned, for good reason) but are oblivious to this fact because if it isn’t trivially discoverable on the Internet then it doesn’t exist. There is still a lot of interesting computer science research that only exists on physical paper, if you can find a copy. Maybe we should be better about digitizing the pre-Internet research but the value of that research isn’t always obvious and the terminology has changed. We don’t give enough credit to how clever some of those early researchers actually were, working from much more primitive foundations. Having gone spelunking a number of times into the old literature, it never ceases to amaze me the number of times I have found an insight that is neither known nor cited in modern literature. Literally lost knowledge. It is ironic that computer science, of all fields, should suffer from this.