Schmidhuber’s research groups have revolutionized handwriting recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, image caption generation, and are now available to over a billion users through Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Baidu. DeepMind also was heavily influenced by his lab.
His team’s Deep Learners were the first to win object detection and image segmentation contests, and achieved the world’s first superhuman visual classification results, winning nine international competitions in machine learning & pattern recognition (more than any other team).
Schmidhuber has published 333 papers, earned 7 best paper/best video awards, the 2013 Helmholtz Award of the International Neural Networks Society, and the 2016 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award. He is president of NNAISENSE, which aims at building the first practical general purpose AI.
Speaking recently at the "The most influential tech conference in Europe," the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) Conference,Schmidhuber provided a comprehensive framework for thinking about artificial intelligence reviewing past developments in the field, and discussing its current (and expected future) effect on the work life, various industries, and infrastructure and even traffic design.
"I think we only need a couple of years until for the first time we will have something like an AI, an artificial intelligence on the level of small animals such as a crow, which can use tools and all kinds of things, or a little monkey," states Schmidhuber.
Framing how the Singularity may arise, he also explains how AI will progress very rapidly. "Once we have animal level AI, the step to human-level AI may not be that huge."
"For that reason, we can probably expect that once we have animal level AI, very soon afterwards we will have something like human-level AI and its not going to stop there."
In case you have forgotten about the power of exponential technology, Schmidhuber enunciates that once this occurs: "Every profession is going to change, and all of civilization is going to change and philosophy and everything is going to change."
Considering his long work on the artificial intelligence problem and his proximity to the key players in the field, Schmidhuber’s words are worth considering.