---
title: "Do Schmidhuber's arXiv:2212.11279 timeline entries verbatim read 'the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914)'?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["schmidhuber","whig-history","historiography-of-ai","verification","history-of-ml"]
---


**Why it matters.** This grounds
[[claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics]],
which reads these three dated entries as evidence that Schmidhuber's
*Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning* is itself Whiggish — it
projects "deep learning" as a category back onto 1676–1914 mathematics and
devices. The hop-batch capture recorded these bracketed date phrases as
findings from a direct read of the arXiv primary, but the promotion that
wrote the claim-note did not independently re-fetch the document (headless
run, no web-fetch access). Note this is a *different* verification target
than [[question-verify-schmidhuber-credit-assignment-opening-and-matthew-effect]],
which tracks the same document's opening sentence and Matthew Effect
language — both questions gate different claims resting on the same primary.

**What to do.**

1. Re-fetch arXiv:2212.11279 (open-access, no paywall). Locate the timeline
   or periodization section and confirm the three bracketed phrases appear
   verbatim, and in what surrounding context — is "deep learning" or "modern
   AI" the noun these dates are attached to, as the claim asserts?
2. Check whether Schmidhuber himself hedges this periodization anywhere in
   the document (compare the "perhaps" hedge already documented for his
   Ivakhnenko dating in [[claim-ivakhnenko-gmdh-first-deep-characterization]])
   — a hedge would soften, though not eliminate, the Whig-history reading.

**On success:** update the claim-note's `audit_status` toward
`verified-verbatim`, record the exact section/page location, and note
whether a hedge changes the framing. Retire this question to `_answered/`
with a wikilink back.