I wish Jürgen Schmidhuber would switch back to actually doing AI research instead of having become completely obsessed with "who invented what" because he feels like he has somehow been academically "robbed" at some point in his career.
He's now officially become a full-blown pariah in the AI world, most relevant people in the space running away at the first sight of his goatee at conferences, knowing exactly the kind of complete and utter crank he's become.
Was anything he claimed in the article incorrect? Personally, I enjoy these types of historical stories.
I'm not criticizing the article at all.
In fact I am generally ignorant on the topic of who invented the transistor, nor do I in general particularly care about who invented what.
The quest for academic fame is something I've always utterly failed to understand.
And, if it the author was anyone but JS I'd not have said anything.
What honks me off about this guy though is to see a someone who did in fact do early impactful work on recurrent neural networks believe that:
a) that automatically gives him some sort of special status wrt the rest of humanity
b) because he didn't get the recognition he believes he is due, has completely stopped doing anything useful in the field, turning instead into an absolute crank that every one in the AI field makes fun of, and with a holy mission to rewrite history to assign credit where credit is due everywhere he believes there was an injustice.
c) every time I see someone with an exceptionally well-working brain waste their time because of ego or sheer stubbornness on shite like this instead of using it to do more interesting work, it makes me very sad.
Schmidhuber is a textbook example of this, and the other perfect example of this is Chomsky, a very smart man, who basically - because of his oversized ego and profound stubbornness - ended up wasting his entire life energy working on a linguistic dead-end AND a political philosophy dead-end.
I have a real hard time understanding how the brain of that kind of folks operates, being so bright on certain axes and totally and utterly dumb on others, especially the total lack of self-awareness.
Wow that is super vitriolic, more if from a colleague. Sure the hehe debate is about if he is to be considered more or less accomplished, but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?
> but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?
Not sure "need" is the appropriate word here.
Grab anyone in who has worked on AI in the last 30 years, and pronounce the word "Schmidhuber" and watch the face of you interlocutor: you'll either get an eyroll or a smirk, but rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".
Nothing vitriolic about describing reality.
I'll just leave this here https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gLnCTgIAAAAJ&hl=en so maybe you realize that's a bit of a tall claim from a random about one of the top researchers in AI, no matter what their opinions are. Perhaps you should look up what a "crank" actually is before labeling researchers, just because they don't match your religion.
Your link did not work for me. "We're sorry…but your computer or network may be sending automated queries."
It's his Google Scholar profile; you can search for it.
It's Juergen Schmidhuber's Google Scholar page
Did I claim anywhere that his early work wad bad?
Nope. The contrary as a matter of fact. But the facts are:
1) nothing worth talking about since the LSTMs
2) most of the reasons why he's been visible in the last 20 years is because of shit like this (JS harassing Ian Goodfellow about attribution in the middle of a technical presentation. Watch the face of Ian, pretty symptomatic of when AI folks have to interact with JS these days).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJVyzd0rqdc&t=3778s
He is usually insufferable (and misleading) when he talks about AI innovation priorities. This article is different, though. It really does seem like Lilienfeld invented the transistor first and should be given credit for that. It also really does look like the official inventors knew that and were somewhat dishonest.
Funny, btw, that nobody here has mentioned that Lilienfeld also invented the electrolytic capacitor.
But: it's obvious why he wrote the article. It is to bolster his own claims, not to give Lilienfeld his due.
How would you distinguish the article from an honest write up about transistors? That is, you know about his crusade in ML, but if you didn't, how would you decide that this article is written in bad faith or not?
I agree that context matters, and I had the same thought as you. But does that mean that anything he writes on the topic of "who was first" is inherently tainted?
Because I read the article and checked the citations. It's a dead giveaway.