No discussion with Schmidhuber is complete without the infamous debate at NIPS 2016 https://youtu.be/HGYYEUSm-0Q?t=3780 . One of my goals as a ML researcher is to publish something and have Schmidhuber claim he's already done it.
But more seriously, I'm not a fan of Schmidhuber because even if he truly did invent all this stuff early in the 90s, he's inability to see its application to modern compute held the field back by years. In principle, we could have had GANs and self-supervised models' years earlier if he had "revisited his early work". It's clear to me no one read his early paper's when developing GANs/self-supervision/transformers.
But more seriously, I'm not a fan of Schmidhuber because even if he truly did invent all this stuff early in the 90s, he's inability to see its application to modern compute held the field back by years. In principle, we could have had GANs and self-supervised models' years earlier if he had "revisited his early work". It's clear to me no one read his early paper's when developing GANs/self-supervision/transformers.