Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

	Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom(people.idsia.ch)
	223 points by tosh 3 days ago \| 98 comments
	tl;dr: Schmidhuber claims that in a few months of 1991, his Munich lab published the foundations of nearly every core technique behind today's LLMs: the first (unnormalized linear) Transformer, unsupervised pre-training, neural network distillation, deep residual learning (later central to LSTMs and ResNets), and the basis of generative adversarial networks. He argues the two most-cited papers of all time stem directly from this work, and notes that despite Munich's early dominance (including Dickmanns's self-driving cars), commercial AI leadership has since shifted to the US and China.
	HN Discussion: ↓Current AI boom owes more to GPU hardware and AlexNet than 1991 Munich theory ↓LSTM credit is solid but Schmidhuber's transformer priority claims are overstated ↑Schmidhuber is correct; his old papers genuinely prefigure many modern techniques ↓Abstract early sketches matter less than decades of validated applied work that followed ↑Article highlights Europe's failure to commercialize and protect its own innovations