Cajal's neurons vs. McCulloch & Pitts' abstraction: where AI neural nets actually come from
vishalmisra · x · 2026-09-26
An illustrated follow-up in vishalmisra's thread: on the left, Cajal's drawings of biological neurons; on the right, McCulloch & Pitts' mathematical abstraction.
The image makes the point visually: modern AI "neural networks" descend from the 1943 mathematical abstraction, not literally from biological neurons — the name survived, the mechanism did not.
Related event: AI Neural Networks Come From Math, Not Literal Brains(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Swarm hype critique: a loop is not AGI — frozen models just sampled more — gerardsans · 2026-09-26
- The demise of software engineering is overblown — programming becomes control engineering around LLMs — viksit · 2026-09-26
- emax: teaching "better prompting" has diminishing returns, cost/carbon is a systems problem — emax · 2026-09-26
- David Sacks: AI regulation lobbying could cost Anthropic and OpenAI their 6-12 month frontier lead — victor_explore · 2026-09-26
- Frontier AI Is a Race of Energy, Data, Talent Density and Release Latency — AryHHAry · 2026-09-26
- Is the obsession with 'building' with AI just an addiction? — Dredgefort · 2026-09-26