Father of Modern AI | Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (Switzerland)
The man who put the G, P and T into ChatGPT, invented and taught AI to think, is coming to DK. Yes — you’ll get to meet the Father of Modern AI himself, Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr. rer. nat. habil. TUM Dipl. Inf. Univ. TUM Jürgen Schmidhuber. Yup, he also put the s, m, a, r and t in smart.
Elon Musk said “Schmidhuber invented everything“, The New York Times headlined that when AI finally matures, it may well call Schmidhuber “Dad“. Many others also quoted, interviewed, used and admired his work. Basically, there are very few people on this planet you can genuinely call pioneers — and Schmidhuber is one of them.
Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber revolutionized machine learning and AI on an unthinkable level as he created two of the most cited AIs of the 20th and 21st centuries. Through Google Translate, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Facebook etc., his AI is on over 3 billion smartphones worldwide, used billions of times daily and utilized in healthcare and medicine, helping to make human lives longer and healthier. Talk about real impact, huh?
But he is no ordinary, let alone boring, scientist; if you watched him at Lex Fridman Podcast, you already know he is a (far from mad) genius with just enough crazy and abstraction to really stretch your imagination to its absolute limits. He was the one who pioneered machines that learn to learn and neural AIs that set themselves their own goals. In other words, if you were ever afraid of the dystopian future in which AI wipes us all out — Schmidhuber is the one who made machines think.
Even when he was a young boy, he thought the most exciting thing was to solve the riddles of the universe. This is because Schmidhuber thinks — and talks — in cosmic scale. Listening to him, you get the sense he’s not predicting the future — he’s remembering it. And honestly? His visionary work found its way to your pocket, your desk and every device you use daily. So yeah, maybe you don’t get to meet the Father of Modern AI every day. But you will in May.
Jürgen Schmidhuber: Modern AI and the Future of the Universe
Back around 1990, a few irrelevant things happened. The Cold War ended, the World Wide Web was born at CERN, the first smartphones appeared, self-driving cars entered traffic — and modern AI based on very deep neural networks quietly took shape, including the core principles behind the G, P and T in ChatGPT. In this talk, Schmidhuber connects those breakthroughs to something much larger: the entire history of the universe since the Big Bang and the even larger future ahead. And what’s next, according to Schmidhuber, isn’t just AI behind screens. It’s real intelligence for real robots in the real world. This is the story of where AI came from — and the far bigger story of where it’s about to take us.