I know Schmidhuber is famously miffed for missing out on the AI revolution limelight, and despite that he runs a pretty famous and well-resourced group. So with a paper like this demonstrating a new fundamental technique, you'd think they would eat the labor and compute costs of getting this up and running on a full gauntlet of high-profile benchmarks, in comparison with existing SOTA methods, vs the sort of half-hearted benchmarking that happens in this paper. It's a hassle, but all it would take for something like this to catch the community's attention would be a clear demonstration of viability in line with what groups at any of the other large research institutions do.

The failure to put something like that front and center makes me wonder how strong the method is, because you have to assume that someone on the team has tried more benchmarks. Still, the idea of learning a better update rule than gradient descent is intriguing, so maybe something cool will come from this :)