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Comment by lwneal | Hacker News Reader

Jürgen Schmidhuber has become notorious in the deep learning community for his claims that new advances from recent years, such as Generative Adversarial Networks, should be credited to him because of obscure work he published in the 1990s.

At NIPS 2016, Schmidhuber interrupted a widely-attended workshop on GANs given by Ian Goodfellow, to make his argument (see [1] at 1 hour, 2 minutes). The community has generally taken Goodfellow's side. Just because Schmidhuber "had the idea" doesn't mean he should get the credit for other peoples' work decades later.

As any entrepreneur knows, just having an idea isn't enough. You have to put the work in, do the experiments and get results.

[1] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Neural-Information-Processi...

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It has become a rite of passage. You have effectively made it as an AI researcher if Schmidhuber decides that your breakthrough is actually derivative work of an idea he published 30 years ago.

The crazy thing is ... he is not entirely wrong. Only mostly.

Yes, Schmidhuber could present things in a better way and be more charitable. But do not overlook his work -- he has genuinely groundbreaking contributions to early theory of intelligence.

I recommend having a stroll through his website, for anyone interested in AI (or even art, creativity, etc.):

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

Special Notes:

Godel Machine : While clearly absolutely impractical, this is a nice theoretical construction on what we could mean by "self-improvement" in a real, definite way.

Speed Priors

Super Omegas (and various thoughts on algorithmic information)

Always keep in mind a grain of salt when reading his results, but they are genuinely great.

---

I think establishing causation and giving credit does have a role in research, namely giving additional opportunity to those researchers to do even better research, elucidating the history of science, and to an extent giving a monetary incentive and morale recognition for researchers w.r.t. prizes, grants, etc.

For example isn't the story of Einstein, or von Neuman, or Feynman, etc. part of a narrative that makes science compelling? They had very interesting and lively lives and opinions that sometimes drove their research tastes. There is value in preserving individual history (as well as disregarding it when not particularly relevant).

That said, a scientists (or a good citizen in general) should not be driven primarily by ego, and in science this becomes clearly bad, impeding open collaboration, exchange of ideas that are essential for good functioning and good progress of science; I'd say Schmidhuber does let that through sometimes, to the detriment of his work.

:-)

Reminds of Dave Ungar haunting OOPSLA talks for some time. There were only two possibilities:

1. The idea you presented was something SELF already did and therefore uninteresting.

2. The idea your presented was not like what SELF already did, and therefore wrong.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hear he has mellowed.

> because of obscure work he published in the 1990s

Well, did you really read it? In what respect do you consider it to be "obscure"? Because they used other terms to name the concepts?

> As any entrepreneur knows, just having an idea isn't enough.

You mean he should have patented it? Is this really the way to go: scientists in machine learning have to patent their work to make sure it's properly attributed in future?

I’m not familiar with the work in question, but this is a common theme in academic research. Sometimes there’s a kernel of an idea published by one individual which is later rediscovered independently (or not) and developed into a much more comprehensive theory. The latter is what the OP means by “just having an idea is not enough.”

> The latter is what the OP means by “just having an idea is not enough.”

That's quite far fetched given the sentence starts with "As any entrepreneur knows". Society can consider itself fortunate that every valuable scientific finding eventually prevails; but unfortunately - as many cases show - it often takes several publications of the same idea, and the respective earlier authors often fall into oblivion (if known at all).

Sometimes people who complain are right. I don't think European researchers necessarily get the credit they deserve in CS.

How comes?

I was not familiar with the character but he sounds like such an asshat in that clip, trying to formulate his opinion as a "question".

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