Back in the early 2000's (when I first started getting into this stuff), Schmidhuber's ideas were absolutely off-the-charts revolutionary compared to anything any other lab was doing. The level of creativity coming out of IDSIA was insane. I truly believe he has not been given even slightly the level of recognition he deserves. Many of the original founders of DeepMind are his direct students. E.g. Alex Graves, who is basically the pioneer of "attention" in neural networks (and we all know what architecture that led to...)