Juergen Schmidhuber: Godel Machines, Meta-Learning, and LSTMs

Lex Fridman’s eleventh episode, recorded before the podcast was famous and before the field admitted how much of it Schmidhuber had sketched first. He walks through the 1990–91 ideas — curiosity as compression progress, networks that model the world, programs that improve themselves — with the cheerful certainty of a man who believes history will need to be corrected in his favor. The Gödel machine section is the ancestor’s-eye view of everything this atlas now files under self-improving AI.