Reading some Schmidhuber's writings on this issue is a great way to learn the history and development of AI and ANN's that is often missed. At the same time Schmidhuber's tone and anal-retentive attitude explains why he is considered so annoying.
The field is full of huge egos and overly simplified narratives from a singular point of view.
For example, it's true that Hinton was a torchbearer of neural networks for several decades and was off mainstream. That gives him well earned legendary status. But it's also true that other methods worked better until early or mid 2000s and had more rigorous theory behind it (theory behind older methods is still better, nn is still mostly experimenting and wandering). Hinton also had position and funding to do pioneering research and collect students all over the world. I remember reading his product of experts paper as a student in 2002 when I worked with boosting and bagging, so clearly he was not completely out of sight.
The field is full of huge egos and overly simplified narratives from a singular point of view.
For example, it's true that Hinton was a torchbearer of neural networks for several decades and was off mainstream. That gives him well earned legendary status. But it's also true that other methods worked better until early or mid 2000s and had more rigorous theory behind it (theory behind older methods is still better, nn is still mostly experimenting and wandering). Hinton also had position and funding to do pioneering research and collect students all over the world. I remember reading his product of experts paper as a student in 2002 when I worked with boosting and bagging, so clearly he was not completely out of sight.