'Father of Modern AI' Schmidhuber Joins Sakana AI to Lead RSI Lab on Recursive Self-Improvement
hardmaru · x · 2026-09-25
Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-creator of LSTM often dubbed the 'father of modern AI,' has joined Sakana AI as Chief Scientific Advisor to lead its new RSI Lab, focused on recursive self-improvement — AI systems that trigger cycles where scientific discoveries generate further discoveries.
Key points:
- Sakana AI says Schmidhuber's 1987 thesis on recursive self-improvement and meta-learning influenced its Darwin Gödel Machine, an agent that rewrites its own code.
- Schmidhuber and CEO David Ha previously argued his 1991 lab work predated linear Transformers, unsupervised pre-training, distillation, and residual learning.
- The lab also plans world models for manufacturing and robotics-oriented physical AI.
- Schmidhuber will visit Tokyo regularly, citing Japan's strengths in neural architectures and robotics.
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