I'm not saying there is nothing of value to be obtained by investigating connections between ML and the brain. That's how I got into ML in the first place, doin

I'm not saying there is nothing of value to be obtained by investigating connections between ML and the brain. That's how I got into ML in the first place, doing theoretical neuro research. We absolutely should and do look to the brain for inspiration. I'm taking issue with the rather ham-fisted series of papers that have come out in recent years aggressively pushing the agenda of connections between ML and neuro that just aren't there. Are you sure that humans have done more net compute on Go than Deepmind just did? The Go game tree is _enormous_, humans are bias. We don't invent strategies from scratch, we use heuristics handed down to us from the pros (who in turn were handed down the heuristics from their mentors). To me, it's not so interesting or surprising that the human initialized net performed worse. We just built the same biases and heuristics we have into that net.