Today on the twitters, Michael Hendricks asked, “Why do AI people bother with how animal brains work? Most good inventions work by doing things totally unlike how an animal would.”

The short answer is that animal brains can already solve the problems that AI researchers want to solve; so why not look into how they are accomplishing it?

The long answer is that in the end, the algorithms that we ultimately use may end up being dramatically different – but we need a starting point somewhere. By looking at some of the algorithms that have a neural inspiration, it is clear that by thinking about ideas of how the nervous system works machine learning/AI researchers can come up with clear solutions to their problems:

Additionally, companies like Qualcomm and the Brain Corporation are attempting to use ideas from spiking neural networks to make much more energy efficient devices.

In the other direction, neuroscientists can find that the brain appears to be implementing already-known ML algorithms (see this post on Nicole Rust). Many ideas and many biological specifics will be useless – but research is the hope of finding the tiny fraction of an idea that is useful to a new problem.

Updated:

Over on reddit, downtownslim offers two more examples: