I am really really tired of this stupid, half-educated claim that gets repeated again and again by NN fanboys. There has never been a dearth of universal funct

I am really really tired of this stupid, half-educated claim that gets repeated again and again by NN fanboys. There has never been a dearth of universal function approximators, polynomials can do it, splines can do it, sine/cosines can do it. Being a universal approximator is hardly unique or special. There is absolutely something special about DNNs but being universal approximators is not one of them. Being able to learn a function from data is very different from being able to represent that function.