Schmidhuber's oft-quoted 'chain rule (1676)…' timeline phrase is drawn from his Abstract's summary sentence, not from the paper's own section headings

schmidhuberwhig-historyhistoriography-of-aihistory-of-mlquote-check

The bracketed-date phrase "the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914)…" — widely excerpted as Schmidhuber's "timeline" of AI history, including in the vault's own claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics — is a single sentence from the Abstract of Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning (arXiv:2212.11279), describing what "a modern history of AI & ML must emphasize." It is not the wording of the paper's own structural divisions. The Table of Contents gives Sec. 2 as "1676: The Chain Rule For Backward Credit Assignment" and Sec. 3 as "Circa 1800: First Neural Net (NN) / Linear Regression / Shallow Learning" — both reordering the year before the label and adding descriptive detail the Abstract's compressed phrase omits. "The first practical AI (1914)" has no corresponding section title at all; the 1914 material (Leonardo Torres y Quevedo's chess end-game automaton) is introduced in the Introduction and elaborated inside the body of Sec. 18 ("It's the Hardware, Stupid!"), never as its own heading.

The phrase is genuine and verbatim — it is not a fabrication or a drift of paraphrase — but it is a compression doing double duty as summary, not the document's own periodization scheme. Anyone citing it as "the paper's timeline entries" is citing an accurate quotation of an inaccurate description of the paper's own structure.