Exactly. I saw his webpage and was overawed until I read about him on reddit. That guy is full of himself.

He has done a lot of pioneering work, to be honest. I recommend seeing him talk (or watch a video), I think his humour comes across better that way

It's interesting to think that Schmidhuber's actually applying machine learning methods to the field of machine learning, e.g. see the opening of http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.htm...

If AGI is the goal and machine learning research is the search algorithm, then Schmidhuber's attempting to perform backpropagation by pushing rewards back along the connections :)

We should use back propagation with government.