Few researchers can claim to have shaped the foundations of modern AI as fundamentally as Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber. His lab developed Long Short-Term Memory, the most cited AI of the 20th century, and his early work laid the groundwork for Generative Adversarial Networks, the linear Transformer principles behind ChatGPT, and neural network distillation methods that underpin efficient training of models including DeepSeek. The New York Times once captured his influence with a simple headline: “When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad.'”
Now Co-Chair of the Center of Excellence for Generative AI at KAUST, Schmidhuber leads research spanning healthcare, drug design, natural language processing and robotics, while contributing to AI education and advising governments on AI strategy. He has authored over 400 peer-reviewed papers and co-founded multiple AI companies.
