This claim is sheer hubris. There is a big difference between spending years researching and working on a nascent subject and publishing it in academic journals, only to have someone else come along and use most of your ideas without attribution and reaping huge rewards for doing so... and having some random ideas float about in your head on a nice summer afternoon by the lake, and then a few months later find out that someone else also shared those same ideas and managed to work through them into something fruitful.

Now whether what Schmidhuber claims is what actually happened or not I don't know... but that is his claim and it's fundamentally different from what you are describing.