Something about the current deep learning hype reminds me of fractals and cellular automata back in the day.
They're all very important and useful scientific advances that can be used to produce visuals that seem to automatically create something strikingly natural. This seems to make people kind of overreach about exactly how much of nature can be represented by this one method alone.
The world is probably not a fractal, the universe is probably not a cellular automaton, and the mind is probably not a "deep learning system" either (of the specific type currently implied by the term).
Deep learning shines when there is a lot of data and computation power. A lot of important problems don't have that much data and there are much better algorithms right now for those problems [1]. Deep learning is definitely faddish though it has its uses.
They're all very important and useful scientific advances that can be used to produce visuals that seem to automatically create something strikingly natural. This seems to make people kind of overreach about exactly how much of nature can be represented by this one method alone.
The world is probably not a fractal, the universe is probably not a cellular automaton, and the mind is probably not a "deep learning system" either (of the specific type currently implied by the term).