If you need to build an airplane, would you rather consult Newton, the Wright brothers, or a modern aerospace engineer? Inventing a field and snatching up the low hanging fruits doesn't mean somebody would be able to consistently create leading edge output. Most of the advances in deep learning are due to hardware scaling, and the success of a few very specific architectures. Yes credit's due where credit's due, but academia name recognition is very much winner take all. For all the criticism Schumidhuber has received, he has a point. The authors of Attention is all you need, the transformers paper, yolo, have nowhere close to the name recognition of the Turing award trio despite generating similar if not more value through their ideas.