Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Juergen Schmidhuber — the man behind LSTMs, the 1991 linear transformer, the first generative adversarial networks, and artificial curiosity — sits down with Tim for a wide-ranging conversation about where AI came from, where it is going, and what it means for humanity.

This is the long-awaited second part of their interview, and Schmidhuber wastes no time. He opens with a provocation: the most influential invention of the twentieth century was not the transistor or the internet, but the Haber-Bosch process for synthesising fertiliser — the thing that made half of humanity possible. The twenty-first century's equivalent, he argues, will be true artificial intelligence.

From there, the conversation traces the lineage of modern AI through Schmidhuber's own work: the 1991 linear transformer (which scales linearly rather than quadratically), fast weight controllers, predictive coding, neural network distillation, and the GPU-powered deep learning revolution that his DanNet system helped ignite. He reflects on the hardware lottery, Nvidia's rise, and why all of today's breakthroughs rest on algorithms invented in the previous millennium.

The middle section covers consciousness (modelled as a chunker-automatiser system), the path from AGI-as-tool to AGI-with-goals, the concept of Homo Ludens, and the geopolitics of the AI race between Europe, the US, and China. Schmidhuber then offers his characteristically optimistic take on existential risk: superintelligent AIs will be curious scientists fascinated by life, not terminators. He connects this to the Fermi paradox, speculating that Earth may be the first planet in our light cone to spawn an expanding AI bubble — a thought that carries, as he puts it, a lot of responsibility.

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REFERENCES:
paper:
[00:05:45] The 1991 Linear Transformer (Unnormalized Fast Weight Controller)
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/FKI-147-91ocr.pdf
[00:11:00] Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation
arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360
[00:15:57] The Hardware Lottery
arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489
reference:
[00:25:00] NNAISENSE - AI for the Physical World
nnaisense.com
book:
[00:35:00] Homo Ludens
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

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LINKS:
Full Transcript: app.rescript.info/share/ab733cfc4ca23500252b59b180c71f4a
Download PDF transcript: app.rescript.info/api/public/sessions/e20de2659d4ca617/pdf