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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

>if there is no pixie dust that makes humans intelligent [...] then neural net breakthroughs [...] have the potential [...]

You're assuming neural nets are the right model.

Like a 19th century person saying, "if there is no pixie dust ... then eventually Newtonian mechanics will explain these unexpected wobbles we see in the planets' orbits."

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Yes. Furthermore, neural nets are just one small part of the solution to [edit] general intelligence. A truly scalable intelligence that learns on its own, and doesn't rely on "the right answers" through training data by human experts. Without this training data, neural nets can't do much ...

I kind of doubt if neural nets have to be the right model.

Any model that gives reasonably similar results to human thinking will be useful. Planes don't have feathers and don't eat bugs, but we say that they "fly" anyway, and they carry far more cargo / passengers (and faster) than birds ever could.

What do you mean "assuming" it's the right model - a known-good model is the model in human brains, which is definitely a series of neurons, no? what else would it be?

Here's one: neurons are cells, and cells are really complex and have all sorts of internal state on different scales (organelles, molecules, etc). Neural network models in computers are an extremely simplified abstraction by comparison. And that's still ignoring all the other things that may or may not be happening in the brain beyond the connections betweens neurons themselves.

I think you've fed majorly into the hype but to address your point there was a great comment on neurons (from someone who knows much more than I do) just a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13030766

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