Past, Present, Future, and Far Future of Artificial Intelligence

We are delighted to announce that Prof. Juergen Schmidhuber, often referred to as one of the “fathers of modern AI,” will be giving a public lecture at Kyoto University.

Since the late 1980s, Prof. Schmidhuber has developed many of the techniques and ideas that underpin AI research today. He is known as the inventor of LSTM and CTC, which made practical speech recognition and machine translation possible. He was also an early proponent of self-supervised learning methods that led to today’s deep learning, of “meta-learning” (learning how to learn), and of “world models” that let an agent simulate its environment internally to plan its actions.

In this lecture, Prof. Schmidhuber will look back at the history of AI from the emergence of modern AI around 1990 to the present, and discuss how AI will spread through society and change people’s lives in the years ahead. The talk will cover the shift from AI behind the screen to AI operating in the physical world of robots and factories, and extend to his vision of “machine civilisations” in the far future.

This is a rare opportunity to hear about the past, present, and future of AI from a researcher who has been at the forefront of the field for nearly 40 years.

The lecture is open to everyone, from AI specialists to anyone interested in how AI will change our lives and society. We look forward to welcoming you!

Abstract

Everybody is talking about AI. However, everything that we have seen so far in AI is nothing compared to what’s going to come.

Let’s first provide some historic context. Modern AI emerged around 1990 when the Cold War ended, the WWW was born, the first smartphone was created, the first self-driving cars appeared in traffic, and my little TUM AI lab published foundations of the two most frequently cited scientific articles of all time (with the most citations within 3 years – manuals excluded), while laying the foundations of Generative AI and ChatGPT.

I’ll discuss how in the 2000s this has begun to impact billions of human lives, how AI will continue to make human lives longer and healthier and easier, how AI will benefit all (not just a few big companies), how sophisticated blue collar workers in the physical world will gain a temporary advantage over white collar workers behind the screen.

I’ll discuss how AI will eventually spread from the virtual world behind the screen into the much more challenging physical world of robots, factories, and machines, eventually culminating in life-like, self-replicating and self-improving machine civilisations, which represent the ultimate form of upscaling.

I’ll also discuss what will happen in the next 40 billion years.

• Biography
• Google Scholar

Open To

Anyone is welcome

Format

In-person only (no online streaming)

Language

English

Registration Fee

Free

Registration

No advance registration is required. However, we welcome your questions through the “Submit Your Questions” button below.

Registration Deadline	Wednesday, November 4, 2026　　Now Open

Click here to visit the CIAIER event page

Organizers / Co-organizers

• Organizer: Center for Next-Generation Informatics and AI Education and Research, Kyoto University
• Co-organizer: Kyoto University Office of Research Acceleration (KURA)
• Collaborator: Sakana AI

Inquiry

Center for Next-Generation Informatics and AI Education and Research, Kyoto University
E-mail: ciaier＊i.kyoto-u.ac.jp (Please replace * with @ when entering the email address.)