AT&S Traveled into the Future of AI with Sepp Hochreiter at the Exner Lectures

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The Exner Lectures 2025 took place in Vienna on November 19, followed by the ceremonial awarding of the Wilhelm Exner Medal on November 20. AT&S accompanied both events as a co-partner. This year’s medal went to Prof. Sepp Hochreiter (Johannes Kepler University Linz) for his pioneering contributions to research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

The highlight of the lectures was Hochreiter’s presentation “Industrial Artificial Intelligence”. In it, the AI pioneer outlined the three phases of technological revolutions: Basic research, scaling, and industrial application. After the scaling phase, which was characterized by the dominance of transformer architectures and large language models, the era of industrial AI is now beginning. The focus here is on practical applications, from predictive maintenance and smart grid energy forecasts to automated quality control in production.

Sepp Hochreiter is one of the global leaders in AI development. With the invention of the “Long Short-Term Memory” (LSTM) architecture, he laid the foundation for modern deep learning applications, which are now indispensable for language processing, autonomous driving and industrial automation.

Hardware is key for AI innovations

For AT&S, a leading global manufacturer of IC substrates for high-performance data centers, the further development of AI is of strategic importance. Jan Preibisch, Vice President Strategy at AT&S, emphasized this in his presentation at the Exner Lectures: “The demands on data processing and energy efficiency are increasing rapidly. AI is a key driver of innovation in microelectronics and therefore also for our products.” AT&S is already using intelligent systems to optimize production and create the basis for the next generation of high-performance computing. As the only microelectronics manufacturer in Europe with local substrate production, AT&S is a key company for building the infrastructure for an AI-driven future.

The Exner Lectures impressively demonstrate how science and industry are shaping the future together. Every year, the Exner Medal Foundation honors researchers who make new developments and ways of working possible for companies. “We would like to thank our cooperation partner AT&S for the great support of this year’s Exner Lectures and Gala on the occasion of the awarding of the Wilhelm Exner Medal to AI pioneer Sepp Hochreiter, who laid the foundation for artificial intelligence as we know it today,” says Stephan Blahut, member of the foundation’s board of directors.

AT&S warmly congratulates Sepp Hochreiter on winning the Exner Medal 2025 and is already looking forward to the next innovative projects and lectures.