Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom • Hacker News Board

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#61

Post by tsunamifury » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #52

jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

> From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. Well... that's "starve the beast" in action. A lot of things we take for granted, that underpin our m…

Reusable rockets were not invented by nasa because their mission was exploration not commercialization.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#62

Post by jagged-chisel » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

psb217 wrote: post #31

gillesjacobs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them. And that's where Schmidhuber goes off the rails: publicly shaming published papers into citing you isn't good academic practice. It's bullying.

"if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them" -- this is wildly incorrect in an academic context. If I'm using ResNets, I should cite the original ResNet paper, even if I haven't read it. If I'm using Transformers, I should cite the original Transformer paper, even if I haven't read it. If my work is a direct extension of method B, and method B is a direct extension of method A, I should cite the source of…

You make it sound like all original ideas from academia must be cited all the time, even if that was not the source of someone’s inspiration.

If I’m in the private sector, and I rediscover something from first principles, it is not my responsibility to go search all academia to see if someone’s done it before so I can cite their work.

If I rely on a code library that doesn’t explicitly cite papers it was built on, it is also not my responsibility to go find all the papers that it might’ve been built from and cite those papers.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#63

Post by throwa356262 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

Hot take:

The real root of the current AI boom is a master thesis from university of Toronto.

The thesis demonstrated that neural networks much longer than before could be trained by simply having a random fraction of the neurons excluded during forward and back propagation.

That's how we got practical deep neural networks. Without that we would still be in AI winter.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#64

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

tsunamifury wrote: post #61

mschuster91 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. Well... that's "starve the beast" in action. A lot of things we take for granted, that underpin our m…

Reusable rockets were not invented by nasa because their mission was exploration not commercialization.

Cheap reusable rockets allow for a lot more research for a lot less money.

Unfortunately, as the early history of SpaceX shows, it required a lot of failures to learn from to design the current crop of rockets. And that's the advantage that private R&D has... as long as the person in charge has money, failure is an option, because in anything publicly funded, any failure will relentlessly be blamed on the currently governing party by the opposition.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#65

Post by trilogic » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

> it is easy to forget that the foundations of this trillion-dollar industry were laid down over 30 years ago in Munich

Yes is very easy to forget, cause the trillion is not being made in Europe. If it was really conceived in Munich (like the maps that got stolen also), it show how incompetent is Europe to keep it´s technology and protect European companies.

It is painful to read this article.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#66

Post by tchalla » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #24

jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

I do a lot of work that is based on academic research, aka building a proprietary sparse embedding model. My issue with academia is that they don’t bother to solve the practical issues. They tell you how to build a PPMI model, but what about hitting a database that’s 500TB to find co-occurrence numbers? This isn’t even touched so you’d then have to go and invent a bazillion of algorithms yourself to make your life ea…

> My issue with academia is that they don’t bother to solve the practical issues. They tell you how to build a PPMI model, but what about hitting a database that’s 500TB to find co-occurrence numbers?

Soon we will also blame academia for not providing iOS and android apps

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#67

Post by fantod » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #8

jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

Like half of what Schmidhuber is always complaining about is that (except for LSTMs) people aren't standing on the shoulders of his research very much. They try to solve some of the same problems people have always wanted to solve, try some of the same approaches people always tend to try, and then tinker until it works. At no point do they consult Schmidhuber's decade-old papers where he tried something kind of simi…

It's not just the papers. It's also the students and their students, many of whom ended up working in the top labs today.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#68

Post by ks2048 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #35

It's crazy to think that if Elon Musk hadn't mentioned Schmidhuber, most people would have no idea. It's nauseating how all the researchers who happened to work for big tech got tons of media coverage but Schmidhuber and his team were getting zero coverage yet they made massive contributions. I bet there are many others not mentioned. Nobody even knows about Frank Rosenblatt. It's insane how distorted our perception…

> Nobody even knows about Frank Rosenblatt.

Very Trump-like statement - "Not many people know this, but ...". Yes, I lot of people know this. Any class that even says a little about the history of NNs will talk about Rosenblatt and the Perceptron.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#69

Post by Sharlin » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

trilogic wrote: post #65

> it is easy to forget that the foundations of this trillion-dollar industry were laid down over 30 years ago in Munich Yes is very easy to forget, cause the trillion is not being made in Europe. If it was really conceived in Munich (like the maps that got stolen also), it show how incompetent is Europe to keep it´s technology and protect European companies. It is painful to read this article.

Somehow "protecting companies" by keeping basic research, done openly at a university lab, from being "stolen"? What?

It's like saying it's painful that the Web was invented in Europe and opened for everybody rather than being kept at CERN to protect European companies.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#70

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #47

The current AI boom has more to do with NVIDIA, and the popularity of computer gaming giving us GPU compute, than who was using neural networks back in 1990's. More specifically, it was really AlexNet, the 2012 ImageNet entry, running on two NVIDIA GTX 580's, that highlighted the practicality and utility of running large scale neural nets on affordable hardware. CUDA had been released in 2006, but cuDNN (the CUDA lib…

This is well put.

2012 really fundamentally changed everything for the AI community, I’d argue because tensorflow/keras/pytorch followed and that made the infrastructure accessible for distributed training.