Jürgen Schmidhuber Joins Sakana AI as Chief Scientific Advisor
Jürgen Schmidhuber, a deep learning pioneer and vocal critic of AI history revisionism, has been appointed Chief Scientific Advisor at Sakana AI.
Jürgen Schmidhuber, a professor at IDSIA and one of the pioneers of deep learning, has officially joined the research lab Sakana AI as its Chief Scientific Advisor.
Schmidhuber is well-known in the community not only for his fundamental work in the 1980s and 1990s but also for his sharp criticism of modern narratives regarding "new" AI ideas. He has repeatedly emphasized that architectures often attributed to other scientists—such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), commonly associated with Yann LeCun and LeNet—have deep roots in his own research and that of his colleagues at the time. He has also highlighted issues regarding the authorship of Hopfield networks.
Hiring Schmidhuber as an advisor at Sakana AI, a lab specializing in bio-inspired and autonomous AI agents, is being perceived by the community with a mix of respect and irony. On one hand, it is a recognition of his scientific authority. On the other, it serves as a safeguard: he will now personally oversee the accuracy of historical citations in their developments.
"He will be advising on how to correctly cite his papers from the 80s," jokes circulating in tech communities suggest.
Why it matters
AnalysisThis appointment highlights the growing importance of academic integrity and the correct attribution of foundational ideas in the era of rapidly evolving autonomous AI agents.
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