What is Jürgen Schmidhuber best known for in artificial intelligence?
Schmidhuber is best known for his work on long short-term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network architecture that was the dominant technique for natural language processing tasks in the 2010s. He co-authored the most cited LSTM publication in 1997 with his former student Sepp Hochreiter. He also introduced early versions of adversarial neural networks, highway networks, fast weights (a precursor to linear transformers), and contributed to superhuman computer vision with convolutional neural networks on GPUs.
When was LSTM invented and who created it?
LSTM grew out of Sepp Hochreiter's 1991 diploma thesis, supervised by Schmidhuber. The name LSTM appeared in a 1995 technical report, and the landmark publication came in 1997, co-authored by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber. The standard LSTM architecture was introduced in 2000 by Felix Gers, Schmidhuber, and Fred Cummins.
What is the dispute between Jürgen Schmidhuber and the 2018 Turing Award winners?
Schmidhuber wrote a 2015 article arguing that Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning, heavily cited each other while failing to credit earlier pioneers of the field. LeCun responded in the New York Times accusing Schmidhuber of claiming undeserved credit. Schmidhuber replied that LeCun offered no supporting examples and published detailed accounts of specific priority disputes with all three researchers.
What does the term 'schmidhubered' mean in the AI community?
"Schmidhubered" is a term used jokingly in the AI community to describe Schmidhuber's practice of publicly challenging the originality of other researchers' work, often at the end of conference talks. Some view it as a rite of passage for young researchers. Others suggest his confrontational personality has caused his significant contributions to be underappreciated.
What company did Jürgen Schmidhuber found and what does it do?
Schmidhuber founded NNAISENSE in 2014 to develop commercial AI applications in finance, heavy industry, and self-driving cars. Sales were under eleven million US dollars in 2016, with the emphasis placed on research over revenue. The company raised its first round of capital funding in January 2017, and as of 2026 its focus has shifted from artificial general intelligence to asset management.
What awards has Jürgen Schmidhuber received for his contributions to AI?
Schmidhuber received the Helmholtz Award of the International Neural Network Society in 2013 and the Neural Networks Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2016, the latter cited for "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." He is also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.