Comment by ekjhgkejhgk

To comment on the substance.

It seems that these two people Schimidhuber and Hochreiter were perhaps solving the right problem for the wrong reasons. They thought this was important because they expected that RNNs could hold memory indefinitely. Because of BPTT, you can think of that as a NN with infinitely many layers. At the time I believe nobody worries about vanishing gradient for deep NNs, because the compute power for networks that deep just didn't exist. But nowadays that's exactly how their solution is applied.

That's science for you.