Profile of Jürgen Schmidhuber, the controversial AI pioneer whose Swiss startup Nnaisense is working on developing an artificial general intelligence (AGI)
Jürgen Schmidhuber says he'll make machines smarter than us. His peers wish he'd just shut up. Tweets: @roydanroy , @muellerfreitag , @valleyhack , @atbwebb , and @mark_riedl Tweets: Daniel Roy / @roydanroy : Haven't read the article but I totally sympathize with Schmidhuber. He was doing VERY creative things with networks for decades and now that scholarship has gone to shit, no one knows, nevermind cites, his work. And when he points out connections, people are stingy and bitch. http://twitter.com/... Moritz / @muellerfreitag : Bloomberg's @valleyhack published a witty profile of polarizing AI pioneer Juergen Schmidhuber. Lots of interesting tidbids and a couple of good laughs https://www.bloomberg.com/... Ashlee Vance / @valleyhack : Meet Juergen Schmidhuber. He's an AI genius but a very, very controversial one. He thinks he may have figured out the fate of the human species, and there's actually a chance that he's right. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Had much fun writing this one. Alex Webb / @atbwebb : If you've even a mild interest in tech and only have time to read one thing today, make it @valleyhack's profile of polarizing AI pioneer Juergen Schmidhuber. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Mark Riedl / @mark_riedl : There something kind of surreal about mainstream media explaining “Schmidhubered” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance profiles Jürgen Schmidhuber at a moment when his Swiss startup Nnaisense is explicitly chasing artificial general intelligence — and when his standing in the field is defined as much by disputes over credit as by his research. Daniel Roy's public reaction captures both sides: sympathy that decades of creative network work went uncited, and acknowledgment of why peers bristle when he points out connections.
The through-line matters because the profile predates the field catching up to him: years later he would give an interview explaining how his 1990s neural network work ended up inside Google Translate and Siri, and by 2025 he had resurfaced as director of AI at Saudi Arabia's KAUST, weighing in on DeepSeek and the kingdom's AI ambitions. This 2018 piece is the origin point of that arc.
First-order effects
- Schmidhuber and Nnaisense get a mainstream platform for their AGI ambition at a time when the lab's credibility rests on one man's reputation rather than shipped products.
- The profile forces the credit dispute into the open: Roy's defense of Schmidhuber's uncited scholarship versus peers who resent his priority claims becomes part of the public record.
Second-order effects
- Labs commercializing his ideas' descendants — Google Translate and Siri are the named examples in later coverage — face a standing narrative that their lineage traces to work they never credited, which colors hiring and partnership perceptions around Nnaisense.
- Nnaisense's small-lab AGI pitch competes for talent and capital against far larger players, pushing it toward unconventional patrons — a path that ends, per the later coverage, with a state-funded role at KAUST.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, polarizing pioneers increasingly bypass the Western lab-and-academy consensus via sovereign and state-backed AI programs, a shift the later KAUST chapter makes concrete.
- The profile also feeds the field's split into advancement and safety camps — the same fault line visible in Max Tegmark's existential-risk warnings and in the billionaire investors fighting over AI's future — with figures like Schmidhuber arguing, as his later Guardian interview puts it, that many AI fears are misplaced.
The trend: AI's founding-generation researchers are converting disputed legacies into leverage — first through startups like Nnaisense, then through state-aligned institutions — as the field splits between advancement and safety camps.