Autoencoders lead to other ideas. Understanding AEs and VAEs help you understand GANs, CycleGAN, PixelCNN, Pix2pix, and so on. AEs teach that you can do other t

Autoencoders lead to other ideas. Understanding AEs and VAEs help you understand GANs, CycleGAN, PixelCNN, Pix2pix, and so on. AEs teach that you can do other things with neural networks, apart from supervised learning. VAEs teach that neural networks can parametrize more complex distributions.