Schmidhuber Traces Neural Network Origins Back Over Two Centuries
SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-08-07
Jürgen Schmidhuber quoted his own detailed explanation regarding the historical origins of artificial neural networks (NNs), emphasizing that the foundations of modern AI predate the discovery of biological neurons or 20th-century research.
The core argument points out that the concept of "modern" NNs with two layers of units was actually invented over two centuries ago (1795-1805) by Legendre and Gauss. Although compute was trillions of times more expensive than in 2025, the mathematical foundation was already established. The terminology of artificial NNs and discussions on specific non-learning networks only formally appeared in the 1900s.
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