In 1991, my little AI lab published foundations of the two most frequently cited scientific articles of all time (with the most citations within 3 years). Around the same time, the Cold War ended, the WWW was born in Central Europe, the first smartphones were created, self-driving cars appeared in traffic, and modern AI emerged, including the principles behind the G, P, and T in ChatGPT. I place these events in the history of the universe since the Big Bang, and discuss what’s next: not just AI behind the screen in the virtual world, but physical AI for real robots in the real world. Intelligent robots that can quickly learn to operate the tools and machines operated by humans can also build more of their own kind. This will culminate in autonomous, life-like, self-improving machine civilisations, which will shape the future of the solar system and the entire cosmos. Short-term side effect: our AI will continue to make people’s lives longer, healthier and easier.

• 17:30 Check-in

• 18:00 Lectio Magistralis begins

  Welcome Remarks

  Valeria Morra – Associate Managing Director CSP-IAS

  Alberto Anfossi – Secretary General, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo

  Antonio Emilio Calegari – Director, The Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI4I)

   

  Past, Present, Future, and far Future of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
  Jürgen Schmidhuber

   

• 20:00 End of the event

The New York Times headlined: “When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’.” He is often called the Father of Modern AI by the media. In 1990-91, he laid foundations of Generative AI, by introducing the principles of Generative Adversarial Networks (now used for deepfakes), unnormalised linear Transformers (see the T in ChatGPT), self-supervised Pre-Training for deep learning (see the P in ChatGPT), and neural network distillation (essential for DeepSeek and other famous models). His lab also produced LSTM, the most cited AI of the 20th century, and the Highway Net (a variant of which is the most cited AI of the 21st century). He also pioneered meta-learning machines that learn to learn (1987-), and neural AIs that set themselves their own goals (1990-). His formal theory of creativity & curiosity & fun (2006-2010) explains art, science, music, and humor. He also generalized algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds theory of physics (1997-2000). Elon Musk tweeted: “Schmidhuber invented everything.” His AI is on billions of smartphones, and used many billions of times per day.

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