June 22, 2026
AI origin story or credit heist?
Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
Was AI really born in one Munich lab? Commenters are absolutely not calm
TLDR: The article claims one Munich lab in 1991 laid down key ideas behind today’s AI boom long before Big Tech cash arrived. Commenters were split between giving Schmidhuber his flowers and accusing the post of skipping earlier pioneers, turning it into a messy fight over who really deserves credit.
This post arrives with a huge claim: that many of the ideas powering today’s chatbot boom were sketched out in Munich in 1991, inside Jürgen Schmidhuber’s lab at the Technical University of Munich. In plain English, the article says a lot of the tricks behind modern AI assistants were dreamed up there decades before today’s tech giants started spending billions. It’s a classic “the future was hiding in an old university lab” story — and the comments instantly turned it into a full-on credit war.
The loudest reaction was basically: “Hold on, not so fast.” One commenter argued that if you’re talking about the roots of modern AI, you can’t just skip past earlier pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and the wider 1980s research scene in places like Edinburgh. In other words, the community smell-tested the article and immediately asked whether this was history… or historical rebranding. Another thread took a different turn and used the article as ammo in a bigger fight: if university labs really planted the seeds of today’s trillion-dollar AI race, what does that say about the popular online take that academia is slow, useless, and living off taxpayer money? That sparked some delicious subtext: maybe the nerds in old labs deserve more credit than flashy private companies.
And then, because this is the internet, the side quests arrived. One person dropped a bare Wikipedia link like a digital eyebrow raise. Another cheered, “TU Munich is cool :-),” while someone else pointed readers to Schmidhuber’s very spicy Nobel-prize grievance page — because apparently no AI history debate is complete without a little academic beef. So yes, the article is about the roots of AI, but the comments made it about something even juicier: who gets to write the origin story.
Key Points
- •The article argues that several techniques central to modern AI systems were published by Jürgen Schmidhuber’s team in Munich in 1991.
- •It says the Technical University Munich lab introduced an early Transformer variant, unsupervised pre-training, neural network distillation, and deep residual learning.
- •The article connects these methods to present-day large language models such as ChatGPT.
- •It also states that the lab laid early groundwork for generative adversarial networks and later generative AI.
- •David Ha links Schmidhuber’s earlier work to later developments including Google Brain, Sakana AI’s recursive self-improvement research, and World Models.