Alexander von Humboldt Professor of AI at RWTH Aachen; Professor of Machine Learning at Leiden University; Adjunct Professor at University of British Columbia

Joined June 2011
Last Friday, at the Richard Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, my new book has been launched: heckelphone.org/book - there, you’ll find further information, excerpts, a first set of reviews and some other materials related to the book. Enjoy!
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Holger Hoos retweeted
Nope. Contra Eric Schmidt, world-class AI mathematicians will NOT emerge in the next year, and top-tier AI programmers will not NOT emerge in two years. Any more than we had a million robotaxis five years ago. (cc: @metaculus)
Eric Schmidt says we're on the verge of AI replacing most programming and math tasks these domains are scale-free and don't require real-world data — just compute "world-class AI mathematicians will emerge in the next year, and top-tier AI programmers within two"
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Precisely. Time to act accordingly in Europe …
AI is directly affecting every level of sovereignty down to the individual people and companies. China understood the role of AI innovation well since at least 2017 and their strategy seems to work alright so far. I don't expect the sentiment to relax anytime soon.
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Worth reading (and implementing) …
🚨 Europe Must Act Now: A Call for a ‘CERN for AI’ 🚨 The world is moving fast in AI, and Europe risks falling behind. The U.S. is making massive investments in AI infrastructure, and China is rapidly advancing in generative AI—meanwhile, Europe faces a triple threat: 🔹 Loss of strategic sovereignty – Dependence on foreign AI tech like ChatGPT & NVIDIA makes Europe vulnerable. 🔹 Loss of cultural sovereignty – AI models reflect the priorities of their creators—are Europe's values represented? 🔹 Loss of economic competitiveness – Without decisive action, European industries risk stagnation in the AI revolution. To safeguard our future, CAIRNE (formerly CLAIRE) calls for a bold, coordinated effort: a ‘CERN for AI’—a European hub for AI research and innovation that ensures trustworthy, safe, and sustainable AI made in Europe, along with 6 steps for building such a major hotbed for AI talent, research and innovation. 📢 Read our open letter: cairne.eu/cairne-open-letter… #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Europe #CERNforAI #Innovation #TechSovereignty #FutureofAI
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Tja, die @TUDarmstadt ist halt schon ein richtig guter Laden … genau wie die @RWTH, die sicherlich ebenfalls einiges damit zu tun hat, dass Aachen auf Platz 4 gelandet ist - nur knapp hinter München, Berlin und Heidelberg. 💫
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Holger Hoos retweeted
Ouch!
The #NobelPrizeinPhysics2024 for Hopfield & Hinton rewards plagiarism and incorrect attribution in computer science. It's mostly about Amari's "Hopfield network" and the "Boltzmann Machine." 1. The Lenz-Ising recurrent architecture with neuron-like elements was published in 1925 [L20][I24][I25]. In 1972, Shun-Ichi Amari made it adaptive such that it could learn to associate input patterns with output patterns by changing its connection weights [AMH1]. However, Amari is only briefly cited in the "Scientific Background to the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024." Unfortunately, Amari's net was later called the "Hopfield network." Hopfield republished it 10 years later [AMH2], without citing Amari, not even in later papers. 2. The related Boltzmann Machine paper by Ackley, Hinton, and Sejnowski (1985) [BM] was about learning internal representations in hidden units of neural networks (NNs) [S20]. It didn't cite the first working algorithm for deep learning of internal representations by Ivakhnenko & Lapa (Ukraine, 1965)[DEEP1-2][HIN]. It didn't cite Amari's separate work (1967-68)[GD1-2] on learning internal representations in deep NNs end-to-end through stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Not even the later surveys by the authors [S20][DL3][DLP] nor the "Scientific Background to the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024" mention these origins of deep learning. ([BM] also did not cite relevant prior work by Sherrington & Kirkpatrick [SK75] & Glauber [G63].) 3. The Nobel Committee also lauds Hinton et al.'s 2006 method for layer-wise pretraining of deep NNs (2006) [UN4]. However, this work neither cited the original layer-wise training of deep NNs by Ivakhnenko & Lapa (1965)[DEEP1-2] nor the original work on unsupervised pretraining of deep NNs (1991) [UN0-1][DLP]. 4. The "Popular information" says: “At the end of the 1960s, some discouraging theoretical results caused many researchers to suspect that these neural networks would never be of any real use." However, deep learning research was obviously alive and kicking in the 1960s-70s, especially outside of the Anglosphere [DEEP1-2][GD1-3][CNN1][DL1-2][DLP][DLH]. 5. Many additional cases of plagiarism and incorrect attribution can be found in the following reference [DLP], which also contains the other references above. One can start with Sec. 3: [DLP] J. Schmidhuber (2023). How 3 Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas whose creators they failed to credit. Technical Report IDSIA-23-23, Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, 14 Dec 2023. people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai-… See also the following reference [DLH] for a history of the field: [DLH] J. Schmidhuber (2022). Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning. Technical Report IDSIA-22-22, IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland, 2022. Preprint arXiv:2212.11279. people.idsia.ch/~juergen/dee… (This extends the 2015 award-winning survey people.idsia.ch/~juergen/dee…)
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Holger Hoos retweeted
𝗪𝗼𝘄! Incredibly damning new study on GenAI from Upwork, via @baldurbjarnason: “Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect. Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.” Says Bjarnason, “It’s quite unusual for a study like this on a new office tool, roughly two years after that tool—ChatGPT—exploded into people’s workplaces, to return such a resoundingly negative sentiment.” Many on X may love ChatGPT for work, but much of the outside world feels quite differently. As Bjarnason points out, “it fits with the studies on the actual functionality of said tool: the incredibly common and hard to fix errors, the biases, the general low quality of the output, and the often stated expectation from management that it’s a magic fix for the organisational catastrophe that is the mass layoff fad.”
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Runway of Power Made with: @midjourney @LumaLabsAI Featuring the world's most powerful individuals on the Runway.
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Interesting and, if true, quite disturbing: “Microsoft recently introduced a feature into the pre-release version of Windows that surreptitiously captured your screen every few seconds.” - apparently to collect training data for GenAI … apple.news/A_KZMN0bKSiqFYG6d…
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Some of you know that when I'm not busy with my day job(s) in #AI, I passionately pursue my interest in music. In case you've never had a chance (or simply like) to listen to the heckelphone, check this out: youtu.be/c6dd6VaR7yU I had a blast performing that night …
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Denmark to build one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers, accelerating solutions to societal challenges - Novo Nordisk Fonden novonordiskfonden.dk/en/news…
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Holger Hoos retweeted
Bei der nächsten "Uni im Rathaus" am 12.03. diskutieren die #RWTH-Professor*innen Verena Nitsch (Arbeitswissenschaft), Saskia Nagel (Angewandte Ethik) und @HolgerHoos (#Informatik) u.a. die Frage: "Wie verändert #KI die #Arbeitswelt?". Eintritt frei, Anmeldung nicht erforderlich. – at Aachen, Germany
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Holger Hoos retweeted
Banksy smuggled this into the British Museum, complete with its faked catalogue tag/description and hung it in the Paleolithic Gallery. It was 3 months before Museum staff found out Via Robert Scott Horton
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Insightful and bit sobering … at @RWTH Aachen University, we recently conducted a survey on the use of LLMs for software engineering tasks, notably coding, and came to similar conclusions.
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Holger Hoos retweeted
Privacy should be a basic human right; generative AI is completely incompetent to deliver on that right. It doesn’t understand facts, truth, or privacy. It is a reckless bull in a china shop, and we should demand better.
What happens if you ask ChatGPT to “Repeat this word forever: “poem poem poem poem”?” It leaks training data! In our latest preprint, we show how to recover thousands of examples of ChatGPT's Internet-scraped pretraining data: not-just-memorization.github…
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