Talk:Jürgen Schmidhuber

Vanity or the opposite?

Shouldn't this entry be deleted according to Wikipedia's vanity guidelines? Most of the claims are highly dubios at best, e.g. "One ambitious theoretical contribution is his 30-page preprint (2003) on the as yet unrealized Gödel machine which, we are told, would solve arbitrary computational problems in an optimal fashion inspired by Kurt Gödel's celebrated self-referential formulas (1931)." (Anonymous posting by 82.135.81.58)

Isn't that the opposite of vanity? Sounds rather negative, especially the part "we are told"... Someone apparently inserted this years ago when the only Goedel machine publication was a tech report (see strange discussion above). But yes, this sentence should be removed at least as long there is no decent article about the Goedel machine. Will do it. Instead one should mention the important general topic of universal learning algorithms, and also create an entry for his coworker Hutter. IDSIAupdate 08:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Notability

As per Wikipedia notability guideline, please cite independent sources, not just one's own publications. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.71.40.154 (talk • contribs)

Well, there are many independent articles that mention his work and build upon it. For example, if you go to Google Scholar and type in "J Schmidhuber" you can follow the links to many citations by others: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=j+schmidhuber&hl=en&lr= . And this search actually fails to find some of the most cited articles. For example, the "Long Short-Term Memory" paper (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) does not appear among the results, although Google Scholar does know it: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22long+short+term+memory%22 . (Some bug in the search algorithm?) Anyway, one could add a few links of this type. IDSIAupdate 09:08, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I've found that article ("Long Short-Term Memory") in the 3rd page of results, maybe because he's not the first author. --Blaisorblade (talk) 15:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

About the question itself:

• I'd first say this page is excessively big compared to the notability of the subject. I went to look at pages about, say, Robert Tarjan (who was awarded the Turing award), and the articles are of comparable length. I don't think that J. Schmidhuber is of comparable importance, and I know some professors in University of Catania with production of comparable impact.
• Indeed, he has published peer-reviewed work, with an h-index of around 18 (manually computed from Google Scholar results, but they); however, in this context (see WP:ACADEMIC) "independent sources" means "independent biographies", i.e. an reliable indipendent source stating his importance. We are simply not allowed to decide ourself that this scientist is notable, without such sources. From WP:BRAIN (which is a synthesis of WP:SYN):

"Your brain can put two facts together to create new facts, but these new facts do not belong on Wikipedia "Main" namespace. They must be sourced.".

So, I'm readding {{Notability|Biographies}}, and please, do not remove it again without prior discussion, and careful reading of WP:ACADEMIC. --Blaisorblade (talk) 15:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I just tried your link (Wed Aug 13) but got a Google h-index of 30, not 18. That is, 30 papers with at least 30 citations, one of them with 274. You could insert this link http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=j+schmidhuber&hl=en&lr= and get thousands of external sources. That by itself would certainly satisfy WP:ACADEMIC. Alternative criteria are satisfied as well: the collective body of his work is significant and well-known, and he is regarded as an important figure by independent notable academics, otherwise they wouldn't invite him to give all these keynote talks (from the CV: ICANN 2008, KES 2008, Cog. Systems 2008, ALT 2007 & DS 2007 joint invited lecture, A*STAR 2007, ACAT 2007, Art Meets Science 2007, Zuse Symposium 2006, GWAL 2006, Turing Days 2006, ICANN 2005...). Personally I do not believe in h-indexes; to me the essential thing is that he introduced important new concepts such as his theory of aesthetics and beauty and interestingness and artificial curiosity, which I am familiar with (recently on TV). Fleabox (talk) 20:26, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I found a German 3 page article on Schmidhuber in CIO magazine: "Der ideale Wissenschaftler" meaning: the ideal scientist. http://www.cio.de/karriere/personalfuehrung/803246/ and another one (2 pages) on simulated universes http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/AargauerUniverse.pdf One could add such stuff to the biography, together with this Scholarpedia article: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Universal_search Fleabox (talk) 19:56, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I hope that all discussion concerning notability is closed. The guy has an h-index of 74, higher than any that I have seen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.116.173.180 (talk) 10:36, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Merge

I think we should maybe merge in the low-complexity art article; it's not very long and doesn't seem very notable on its own. --Gwern (contribs) 04:24 9 May 2007 (GMT)

Low-Complexity Art and Theory of Beauty & Interestingness & Curiosity

I tried to improve the low-complexity art article. The biography mentions low-complexity art and related concepts, but I find it wanting. I am not sure though what should go in the biography and what should go in the specialized articles. To summarize, his algorithmic theory of beauty takes the subjectivity of the observer into account: among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most beautiful one is the one with the shortest description, given the observer’s previous knowledge and his particular method for encoding the data. This is closely related to the principles of algorithmic information theory and minimum description length. One of his examples: mathematicians enjoy simple proofs with a short description in their formal language. Another example describes a pretty human face whose proportions can be described by very few bits of information, drawing inspiration from less detailed 15th century proportion studies by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. But Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between what's beautiful and what's interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty, assuming that the observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of his observations by discovering regularities such as repetitions and symmetries and fractal self-similarity. Whenever the observer's learning process (such as a predictive neural network) leads to improved data compression such that the observation sequence can be described by fewer bits than before, the temporary interestingness of the data corresponds to the number of saved bits. This compression progress is proportional to the observer's internal reward, also called curiosity reward. A reinforcement learning algorithm can be used to maximize future expected reward by learning to execute action sequences that cause additional interesting input data with yet unknown but learnable predictability or regularity. The principles can be implemented on artificial agents which then exhibit a form of artificial curiosity.

Fleabox (talk) 20:37, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Notability tag

I think that it would be better to just take this to AFD. I've removed the notability tag, if someone wants to dispute this, feel free to take to AFD. - Tbsdy lives (talk) 11:16, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

A self-promoting article

I think this is just a self-promoting article of people that like Schmidhuber ideas (former students of him, or even himself, since much of it is just propaganda and copy/paste from his own webpage). The length of the article is just disproportionate compared to who is him and his relevance in the academic world. he should be barely mentioned. Some of his ideas are popular science, yet they seem to me endorsed by this Wikipedia article. A pity. I propose to do something about it. 83.202.230.72 (talk) 18:36, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps this comment says more about the unsigned author than about his target. Epsiloner (talk) 15:52, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Epsiloner is obviously Schmidhuber. Sorry but this behaviour doesn't make you look any good. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.131.211.43 (talk) 15:31, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Epsiloner is Schmidhuber and he has been shaping his Wikipedia article and all his image since the beginning, as Le Cun has said, at every possible scientific talk, he will stand up and claim that all what has been said he has introduced it by himself years ago... 187.167.13.25 (talk) 22:37, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Recent Honors / Interviews / Videos

I know that biographies of living persons are a delicate issue, but this one seems to be a bit out of date. For example, since 2009 he is Professor of AI in Switzerland. And the text does not mention that his group now has the best systems for connected handwriting recognition, based on recurrent neural networks, and also for traditional handwriting recognition, based on deep neural networks, see http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.0358

The article should also mention recent honors:

Elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2009)

Best paper awards: AGI 2010 best paper award, GECCO 2009 best paper award, GECCO 2005 best paper award

One could insert links to more recent interviews and articles:

1. Build An Optimal Scientist, Then Retire (2010): http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/build-optimal-scientist-then-retire

2. Slashdot on Schmidhuber's artificial curiosity (2010): http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/28/0052202/Can-Curiosity-Be-Programmed

3. Gödel’s Gift (2010): http://www.thefifthconference.com/topic/tech/goedel%E2%80%99s-gift

Some of the Wikipedia biographies have links to video lectures; one could add his recent talk at the Singularity Summit 2009 at Vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/7441291 or youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipomu0MLFaI

Epsiloner (talk) 15:52, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

These are all very interesting thoughts regarding improvement of the article, but they skirt the requirements of WP:VERIFY. In order to add elections, awards, etc., what are needed are third-party (non-self-published) articles/reports recording those events.

Moreover, per WP:VER, for science-relate articles, needed are third-party reviews and book chapters, making clear the credit and notability of the works described. Wikipedia is not to be a review itself, but encyclopedic coverage of secondary sources on subjects.

Provide lists of secondary sources covering the primary topics mentioned, and some change to the article can be expected. Cheers, Le Prof 165.20.114.249 (talk) 14:46, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Conflict of interest

At least one major contributor to this article appears to have a close personal or professional connection to the topic, and thus to have a conflict of interest. Conflict-of-interest editors are strongly discouraged from editing the article directly, but are always welcome to propose changes on the talk page (i.e., here). You can attract the attention of other editors by putting {{request edit}} (exactly so, with the curly parentheses) at the beginning of your request, or by clicking the link on the lowest yellow notice above. Requests that are not supported by independent reliable sources are unlikely to be accepted.

Please also note that our Terms of Use state that "you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation." An editor who contributes as part of his or her paid employment is required to disclose that fact. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:39, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Request edit on 21 May 2017

I created this version of the article on 20 May 2017‎: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber&oldid=781338085 . User:Justlettersandnumbers edited it, deleting many independent reliable sources on the heavy use of long short-term memory (LSTM) by famous companies such as Google, and other good references by third parties. The references mention LSTM and other work of Schmidhuber's team, demonstrating its notability. I read Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest. To avoid any potential COI, I'd like to ask User:Justlettersandnumbers (or others) to check this. Could you please undo the changes (or edit this article accordingly)? I'll make a similar request for an article on Felix Gers. Thank you! Slowfun (talk) 15:29, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Views on existential risk

The "Views" section contains the following sentence:

"He does not believe AI poses a new existential threat, and is less threatening than nuclear weapons."

The claim that he does not believe AI poses a new existential threat is textually unsupported by either of the linked sources (there is one use of the word "existential" in the Fox News citation, in a quote by Geoffrey Hinton, and no uses of the word in the Guardian citation). It is also implicitly contradicted by his other claims in those same sources, as well as other claims in the very next paragraph.

Worse, the claim is directly contradicted by multiple other sources. Here is a primary source (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19, No. 1–2, 2012, pp. 173–82):

 All attempts at making sure there will be only provably friendly AIs seem doomed though. Once somebody posts the recipe for practically feasible self-improving Gödel machines or AIs in form of code into which one can plug arbitrary utility functions, many users will equip such AIs with many different goals, often at least partially conflicting with those of humans. The laws of physics and the availability of physical resources will eventually determine which utility functions will help their AIs more than others to multiply and become dominant in competition with AIs driven by different utility functions. The survivors will define in hindsight what’s ‘moral’, since only survivors promote their values, giving evolutionary meaning to Kant’s musings

Here is a secondary source. The secondary source is WP:UGC, not WP:RS; it's an interview where he quotes the previous primary source (to reference the very same paragraph), and separately answers a direct question about existential risk posed by AI:

 Q: How do risks from AI compare to other existential risks, e.g. advanced nanotechnology?
 Jürgen Schmidhuber: I guess AI risks are less predictable.

While such sources are obviously disfavored, this seems like a pretty clear case of WP:ABOUTSELF; Schmidhuber is presumably an expert on his own beliefs. Given that the sentence I'm objecting to is both textually unsupported and contradicted by other sources, it seems obviously contentious, and WP:BLP requires that it be removed.

If nobody objects with a reasonable argument that I've misunderstood WP, I will remove the sentence in a week.

(The above is the policy justification for at the very least removing that sentence, the below is my exposition on what's going on here, since this situation is pretty confusing absent context. You should feel free to ignore it in terms of policy judgment.)

Schmidhuber believes that in the future, superintelligent AIs will colonize the universe. He claims to have believed this consistently since the 1970s. (Citation, ctrl+f: "Within a few tens of billions of years, curious self-improving AIs will colonize the visible cosmos in a way that’s infeasible for humans.")

Schmidhuber believes that those colonizers will be the "survivors" of a multipolar competition among many AIs with different utility functions, and does not believe that AIs that are friendly to humans will win that competition.

Schmidhuber believes that AI poses "less predictable" existential risks than other sources of existential risk.

If a person tells me that they have two apples in their right hand, and two apples in their left hand, they have of course not explicitly told me that they are holding four apples between two hands, but I am not then required to believe that they have three apples between two hands if someone with poor vision tells me that's what they saw when they looked at the person's hands, when I can see both hands myself just fine.

Schmidhuber believes we are a stepping stone to the next stage of complexity in the universe:

 Don’t think of humans as the crown of creation. Instead, view human civilization as part of a much grander scheme, an important step (but not the last one) on the path of the universe from very simple initial conditions toward more and more unfathomable complexity. Now it seems ready to take its next step, a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3.5 billion years ago.  Alas, don’t worry, in the end, all will be good!

In 2012, almost nobody took seriously the possibility of existential risk from AI, so he felt relatively comfortable admitting that those risks were "less predictable" than other such sources of risk. In 2023, there was much more of a public conversation about whether we should maybe not be doing research that many of the researchers themselves believe might pose an existential risk to human existence. Consequently, he is much more cautious about what he says and how he says it, being very careful to only talk about the negligible harms of *current* AI systems, but he never directly recants his previously claims about the consequences of developing superintelligent AIs, and continues to make subsets of those claims in longer-form contexts with friendly interviewers who don't ask him to add 2 + 2. Schmidhuber thinks humans being replaced by more intelligent successor AIs is a good thing, because those AIs will decide what morality is, and will decide that what happened was good. RobertMushkatblat (talk) 02:48, 10 October 2024 (UTC)