Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber

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, and then retire. In a single “Miraculous Year,” 1990-91, he laid the foundations of “Generative AI” by introducing the principles of Generative Adversarial Networks (now widely used for deepfakes and other applications), unnormalized linear Transformers (the “T” in “ChatGPT” stands for “Transformer”), and self-supervised Pre-Training for deep learning artificial neural networks (the “P” in “ChatGPT” stands for “PreTrained”).

This early work on the “G,” “P,” and “T” in GPT has had a wide-ranging impact and earned him the nickname “Father of Generative AI.” He also pioneered artificial curiosity and meta-learning machines that learn to learn (since 1987). His lab 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 (a variant of which has become the most cited AI of the 21st century). By the mid-2010s, his team’s AI was 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. In 2006-2010, he published the “formal theory of fun and creativity.”

Elon Musk tweeted: “Schmidhuber invented everything.” He is the recipient of numerous awards, Director of the AI Initiative at KAUST in KSA, Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and co-founder of NNAISENSE. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major events and advises governments on A.I. strategies.