Schmidhuber: LLMs aren't truly creative because they haven't implemented his 2008 Formal Theory of Fun
SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-09-16
Jürgen Schmidhuber reiterates his long-standing claim: current LLMs aren't truly creative because they haven't implemented his "Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity" (2008, arXiv:0812.4360).
Core ideas:
- Compression progress drives everything: data becomes interesting to a computationally limited observer once it learns to predict/compress it better, making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful.
- Curiosity = maximizing compression progress, i.e. the first derivative of subjective beauty — the steepness of the learning curve.
- The principle explains beauty, novelty, surprise, attention, creativity, art, science, music and jokes, applying to infants, mathematicians, artists and (since 1990) artificial systems.
Related event: Schmidhuber Says LLMs Lack True Creativity, Citing His Own Fun Theory(3 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- dhh: agents' great gift is routing around every gatekeeper in software — Stack Overflow proved it — IgorCarron · 2026-11-02
- Unruly Futures 2026 convenes on post-AGI economics and AI-governed institutions — sarahdrinkwater · 2026-11-02
- Are We Building Conscious AI Servants? Shevlin and Williams on Dawkins and Claude — dioscuri · 2026-11-02
- Why is AI sexist? Reddit debate on models overlooking Iceland's women's strike — Mathemodel · 2026-11-02
- Henry dioscuri: 'all known conscious entities are alive' proves nothing about AI consciousness — dioscuri · 2026-11-02
- Santa Fe Institute's Eric Smith on the anthropocentrism paradox in one quote — danfaggella · 2026-11-02