Anyone interested in this field should definitely engage thoroughly with his body of work.
Schmidthuber is famous for his groundbreaking work in machine learning, but also for being somewhat left out when people list the "Grandparents of Deep Learning" and for being vocal about that. I just wanted to poke that bit. If your work takes off, it would be a great chance for him to shine.
On this topic, I have been pleasantly surprised to see some of the works he has recently supervised receive direct recognition, particularly the Huxley-Gödel Machine and its many siblings in the field of self-improving AI: https://github.com/metauto-ai