Jürgen Schmidhuber

KAUST | Father of Modern AI, Director AI Initiative | Speaker

AI & Innovation

The New York Times headlined: "When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'." He is often called the Father of Modern AI by the media. Since age 15, his main goal has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence smarter than himself, then retire. His lab's deep learning artificial neural networks have revolutionised machine learning and A.I. By 2017, they were on over 3 billion smartphones, and used billions of times per day, for Facebook’s automatic translation, Google’s speech recognition, Google Translate, Apple’s Siri & QuickType, Amazon’s Alexa, etc. Generative AI is also based on his work: he introduced principles of artificial curiosity and generative adversarial networks (1990, now widely used), unnormalised linear Transformers (1991, the "T" in "ChatGPT" stands for "Transformer"), self-supervised pre-training for deep learning (1991, the "P" in "ChatGPT" stands for "pre-trained”), and meta-learning machines that learn to learn (since 1987, now widely used). His lab also produced LSTM, the most cited AI of the 20th century, and the LSTM-inspired Highway Net, the first very deep feedforward net with hundreds of layers (ResNet, the most cited AI of the 21st century, is an open-gated Highway Net). In 2006-2010, he published the "formal theory of fun and creativity." Elon Musk tweeted: "Schmidhuber invented everything." He is recipient of numerous awards, Director of the AI Initiative at KAUST in KSA, Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major events, and advising various governments on A.I. strategies.