background from the great Genius Makers history of ML: 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 Schmidh…
Reading some Schmidhuber's writings on this issue is a great way to learn the history and development of AI and ANN's that is often missed. At the same time Schmidhuber's tone and anal-retentive attitude explains why he is considered so annoying. 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 se…
LeCun would probably also be upset if he read about his work in the newspaper, but mis-attributed to someone else.
Also, millions in funding money depend on stuff like this. If LeCun can pretend to be the inventor, he gets the grant money. If Schmidhuber gets the citation he seeks, he can use that to apply for new funding. So it's not just prestige, these citation issues have a large monetary impact, too.