LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence does not cite prior work

I agree with the parent comment. Ultimately, Science is about advancing the human condition more than celebrating great individuals. While I'm sympathetic to Schmidhuber's feelings he isn't given sufficient credit, he's still an internationally recognized, fully tenured professor.

The press needed heroes for its AI narrative. It chose Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and sometimes Ng, thanks largely to the promotional efforts of Google and Facebook. The narrative did not extend to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the German researcher based on Lake Lugano who carried the torch for neural networks in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s. Some took issue with Schmidhuber's exclusion, including Schmidhuber. In 2005, he and Alex Graves, the researcher who later joined DeepMind, had published a paper describing a speech recognition system based on LSTMs-neural networks with short-term memory. "This is that crazy Schmidhuber stuff," Hinton had told himself, "but it actually works." Now the technology was powering speech services at companies like Google and Microsoft, and Schmidhuber wanted his due. After Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio published a paper on the rise of deep learning in Nature, he wrote a critique arguing that "the Canadians" weren't as influential as they influence would soon reverberate across the industry-Schmidhuber stood up in the audience and chastised him for not citing similar work in Switzerland from the 1990s. He did this kind of thing so often, it became its own verb-as in: "You have been Schmidhubered."

The field is full of huge egos and overly simplified narratives from a singular point of view.

For example, it's true that Hinton was a torchbearer of neural networks for several decades and was off mainstream. That gives him well earned legendary status. But it's also true that other methods worked better until early or mid 2000s and had more rigorous theory behind it (theory behind older methods is still better, nn is still mostly experimenting and wandering). Hinton also had position and funding to do pioneering research and collect students all over the world. I remember reading his product of experts paper as a student in 2002 when I worked with boosting and bagging, so clearly he was not completely out of sight.

I can't believe you're defending academic plagiarism. His papers were not obscure, they were foundational. So what if he has a bad attitude; you would too if people kept stealing your ideas without giving you any credit.

It's not like Schmidhuber's papers are obscure.

>I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming

You're engaging in toxic victim-shaming. What, you expect him to just bend over and accept people stealing his ideas without giving him credit? Fundamentally the researchers who stole from him were engaging in unethical behaviour and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that without consequence.