Gary Marcus

There's a major difference: DL was guided in its infancy by ideas from neuroscience, so there is a relatively direct link between them. In contrast, the application of quantum mechanics to the c-word is taking two distinct fields and tying them together on speculative grounds.

The relation between deep learning - with its single neuron type and largely homogenous architecture - and the actual complexity of the human brain, with > 1000 neuron types, hundreds of proteins at each synapse and > 100 distinct brain regions - is risible.

Every model is an abstraction. Newtonian mechanics ignores air turbulence, molecular interactions, etc. Climate models capture coarse grained interactions, not the multitude of animals, plants, and wind-currents that truly shape the climate. Neural networks are no different.

Let's be real. Current neural nets have been shown empirically to work on some problems (after tinkering to get details right) - but do we really *know* that they are an abstraction of the brain, in which their details map onto simplifications of actual brain processes? No.

I'm sorry, but this is a bad take. Yes, we know they are simplifications of real brains. 1) Neurons do something very similar to linear integration with a non-linearity. 2) They process inputs in a distributed, parallel manner. ANNs capture this basic process, period.

I am amazed at how many ppl resist this basic fact! Folks: you may believe ANNs miss critical biological details, cool, that's a legit position to take. But why pretend that ANNs are not an abstraction of neural processing? That is simply not a tenable position, frankly.