Schmidhuber points to his 2015 paper as the origin of recurrent depth and chain-of-thought

SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-09-03

Asked who the OG of recurrent depth is and which founding papers were forgotten, Schmidhuber pointed to his 2015 paper 'On Learning to Think'.

He explains it went beyond the inefficient millisecond-by-millisecond planning of his 1990 neural world models, addressing planning and reasoning in abstract concept spaces: the controller C acts as an RL prompt engineer that learns to create a chain of thought, querying its world model for abstract reasoning to speed up RL. The prompts are internally self-invented vector sequences that need not represent natural language.

Related event: Schmidhuber Claims OpenAI's Recurrent Depth Traces Back to His 2015 Paper(3 posts)→

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