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Essay 01 · January 2026 · 12 min read

The Incredible Story of Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber

How the "Father of AI" ended up in Saudi Arabia — and what it says about Germany

In 2016, the New York Times published a headline that should have made every German innovation policymaker pause:

"When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'." — The New York Times

Today, that father lives and works in Saudi Arabia. Not because he loves the Wahhabi state. But because Germany — and Europe — gave him no choice.

The Numbers

LSTM Paper (1997)

The paper that made modern AI possible was written in Munich and Lugano. It was ignored for a decade. Then Google, Apple, Amazon, and OpenAI built trillion-dollar empires on it.

Schmidhuber? He got a position in Switzerland. Then Saudi Arabia.

The Timeline

1991 — PhD at Technical University of Munich (TUM). Sepp Hochreiter's diploma thesis identifies the vanishing gradient problem.
1997 — LSTM paper published with Hochreiter. The solution to the vanishing gradient problem. Nobody cares.
2009 — Schmidhuber becomes Professor at University of Lugano, Switzerland. Germany still not interested.
2011 — GPU implementations from Schmidhuber's lab start winning competitions. Deep learning takes off.
2017 — Google publishes "Attention is All You Need." The Transformer. Built on attention mechanisms Schmidhuber claims to have invented in 1991.
2018 — OpenAI GPT. Google BERT. The AI boom begins. All based on LSTM and Transformer architectures.
2021 — Schmidhuber joins KAUST in Saudi Arabia as Director of AI Initiative. $10 billion endowment. "Excellent conditions."
2024 — Germany announces its "AI Strategy." Schmidhuber is in Jeddah, building the future for the Saudis.

The Irony

Every time you use ChatGPT, Claude, Google Translate, or ask Siri a question, you're using technology that traces back to Schmidhuber's lab. Every time a German politician talks about "AI made in Germany," they're talking about a future that already left — on a plane to the Arabian Peninsula.

"KAUST offered excellent conditions and made it easy to switch. From an academic perspective, it's a very attractive place." — Jürgen Schmidhuber, 2024

Translation: Germany didn't offer, didn't make it easy, and wasn't attractive.

The Pattern

Schmidhuber is not an exception. He's the rule.

Germany produces brilliant researchers. Then it ignores them, underfunds them, buries them in bureaucracy — until someone else offers them "excellent conditions."

The pattern repeats across industries: Karl Benz invented the automobile — Germany now imports Chinese electric cars. Konrad Zuse built the first programmable computer — Germany has no significant computer industry. Schmidhuber invented the foundations of modern AI — Germany has no AI champion.

The prophet is never honored in his own land. But in Germany, he's not just ignored — he's actively driven away.

The Saudi Bet

KAUST — King Abdullah University of Science and Technology — opened in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment. Built with oil money. Designed to create a post-oil future.

Schmidhuber now co-chairs their Center of Excellence for Generative AI. His stated goal:

"My position as head of the ambitious KAUST AI Initiative is compatible with my old objective of the 1970s: build an AI smarter than myself such that I can retire." — Jürgen Schmidhuber

He hopes to contribute to "a new Golden Age for science, analogous to the Islamic Golden Age that started over a millennium ago when the Middle East was leading the world in science and technology."

Meanwhile, Germany debates whether AI is a threat to jobs.

The Question

This is not an essay about Schmidhuber. It's an essay about systems.

A system that produces geniuses but cannot keep them is not an innovation system. It's a talent farm for other countries.

A country that talks about "technological sovereignty" while its greatest minds work for Saudi Arabia, America, and China is not sovereign. It's a supplier of human capital to its competitors.

The question is not: "How do we get Schmidhuber back?"

The question is: "How many more Schmidhubers are we losing right now — and to whom?"

Postscript

In December 2024, Schmidhuber gave an interview titled "We have 3 more years." He was talking about AGI — Artificial General Intelligence. The breakthrough that changes everything.

If he's right, it will happen in Saudi Arabia, America, or China.

Not in Germany.

The father of AI has moved on. His children will be born elsewhere.