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: LLMs Lack Creativity Because They Ignore His Theory of Fun(2 posts)→
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