Speaking of Schmidhuber, he serves as a good example: he spends weirdness points like they’re Venezuelan bolivars. Despite him and his lab laying more of the groundwork for the deep learning revolution than perhaps anyone and being right about many things decades before everyone else, he is probably the single most disliked researcher in DL. Not only is he not unfathomably rich or in charge of a giant lab like DeepMind, he is the only DL/RL researcher I know of who regularly gets articles in major media outlets written in large part about how he has alienated people: eg https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/google-amazon-and-facebook-owe-j-rgen-schmidhuber-a-fortune And this is solely because of his personal choices and conduct. It’s difficult to think of an example of a technologist inventing so much important stuff and then missing out on the gains because of being so entirely unnecessarily unpleasant and hard to bear (William Shockley and the Traitorous Eight come to mind as an example; maybe David Chaum & Digicash too).
Speaking of Schmidhuber, he serves as a good example: he spends weirdness points like they’re Venezuelan bolivars. Despite him and his lab laying more of the groundwork for the deep learning revolution than perhaps anyone and being right about many things decades before everyone else, he is probably the single most disliked researcher in DL. Not only is he not unfathomably rich or in charge of a giant lab like DeepMind, he is the only DL/RL researcher I know of who regularly gets articles in major media outlets written in large part about how he has alienated people: eg https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/google-amazon-and-facebook-owe-j-rgen-schmidhuber-a-fortune And this is solely because of his personal choices and conduct. It’s difficult to think of an example of a technologist inventing so much important stuff and then missing out on the gains because of being so entirely unnecessarily unpleasant and hard to bear (William Shockley and the Traitorous Eight come to mind as an example; maybe David Chaum & Digicash too).