Schmidhuber claims Recursive Self-Improvement algorithms date back to his 1987 work, slams 'AI stepfathers'

SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-09-19

Jürgen Schmidhuber republished a technical note (IDSIA-9-26) asserting priority on Recursive Self-Improvement: he published the first concrete RSI algorithms in 1987 when compute was 100 million times more expensive, plus gradient-descent-based RSI in neural networks (1992), self-modifying policies (1994), and the mathematically optimal Gödel Machine (2003). He also fired back at a CNN appearance, calling the three 'AI godfathers' stepfathers who republished techniques from uncited originators.

Related event: Schmidhuber Reasserts He Published First Recursive Self-Improvement Algorithm in 1987(2 posts)→

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